google book thesis

Thesis and Dissertation Guide

• Starting your Dissertation/Thesis
• Dissertation/Thesis Resources
• Books That May Help
• Literature Reviews
• Annotated Bibliography
• We Don't Have It? / Interlibrary Loan
• Online Learning Study Tips
• Search Strategy
• Advanced Search Techniques
• Kemp Library Video Tutorials
• Find Articles / Journals / Databases
• What are...
• Database Video Tutorials
• Peer Reviewed
• How to confirm and cite peer review
• Primary/Secondary Sources
• Other Types of Sources (i.e. Newspapers)
• Legal Research Resources
• Evidence Based Practice/Appraisal Resources

Google Scholar

• Website Evaluation
• Internet Searching
• Apps You Didn't Know You Needed
• Who is citing me?
• Questions After Hours
• ESU Thesis Submission
• ESU Dissertation Submission
• How to Integrate
• How to Use It

What is Google Scholar and Why Should You Care?

Google Scholar is a special division of Google that searches for academic content. It is not as robust as Google, and as such it can be harder to search. However, if you are looking for a specific article it is a fantastic resource for finding out if you can access it through your library or if it's available for free.

Below are a few videos on how to use Google Scholar (you can skip the intros if you want) that will show you tips and tricks on how to best use Google Scholar.

Did you know that you can use Google Scholar in addition to Primo to help search Kemp library materials? You just have to add us to your Google Scholar and our results will show up in your searches showing you what you have access to as an ESU community member!

• Go to  Google Scholar 
• Make sure you're logged into your Google Account -  you'll see your initials or your icon in the top right hand corner of the screen if you're logged in. 
• Click on  Settings  (either from the top of the Scholar home page, or from the drop-down on the right hand side of the results page).

Choose  Library Links .

Type ‘East Stroudsburg University’ into the search box.

Click the boxes next to “ESU” and "Kemp Library"

Click  Save .

If you have other institutions you're affilitated with, or ResearchGate, you can add them too!

Getting to Google Scholar Settings:

The Library Link Screen: Search, Select and Save!

What your search results will look like: 

 Add / Reorder  

Databases have more sophisticated search features than Google Scholar , but if you have a one or two word topic Google Scholar can be useful.  You can also try using the Advanced Search in Google Scholar (see the first video below). 

However, if you're having trouble finding something specific, i.e. a specific article, try Google Scholar. For example you want " Game of Thrones and Graffiti" and you don't see it in a database, search the title of the article in Google Scholar (here you'd search "Game of Thrones and Graffiti"). You may find it freely available OR discover it is available through the library, but in a database you didn't look at. 

If we don't have it and you can't access it on Google Scholar, you can always request it via interlibrary loan .

"If Google Scholar isn’t turning up what you need, try an open Google search with the article title in quotes, and type the added filter “filetype:pdf”. This scours the open web for papers hosted somewhere, by someone, in PDF format. Google Books provides limited preview access to many copyrighted books. Other alternate services include  SemanticScholar ,  Microsoft Academic ,  Dimensions , or  GetTheResearch . Here too there are subject-specific portals like  EconBiz  or the  Virtual Health Library , some of which offer multilingual search options." -  Paragraph taken from A Wikipedia Librarian. 

The other services like Microsoft Academic mentioned above are also useful when looking for freely available journal article and research! Don't forget to cite everything you use in your paper/project/presentation/etc. 

Google Scholar Videos

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• Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 3:12 PM
• URL: https://esu.libguides.com/thesis

• Corrections

Search Help

Get the most out of Google Scholar with some helpful tips on searches, email alerts, citation export, and more.

Finding recent papers

Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:

• click "Since Year" to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance;
• click "Sort by date" to show just the new additions, sorted by date;
• click the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.

Locating the full text of an article

Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here're a few things to try:

• click a library link, e.g., "FindIt@Harvard", to the right of the search result;
• click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
• click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
• click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.

If you're affiliated with a university, but don't see links such as "FindIt@Harvard", please check with your local library about the best way to access their online subscriptions. You may need to do search from a computer on campus, or to configure your browser to use a library proxy.

Getting better answers

If you're new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for "overweight" might suggest a Scholar search for "pediatric hyperalimentation".

If the search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they're citing in their "References" sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature.

Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click "Cited by" to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.

Explore! There's rarely a single answer to a research question. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" to see closely related work, or search for author's name and see what else they have written.

Searching Google Scholar

Use the "author:" operator, e.g., author:"d knuth" or author:"donald e knuth".

Put the paper's title in quotations: "A History of the China Sea".

You'll often get better results if you search only recent articles, but still sort them by relevance, not by date. E.g., click "Since 2018" in the left sidebar of the search results page.

To see the absolutely newest articles first, click "Sort by date" in the sidebar. If you use this feature a lot, you may also find it useful to setup email alerts to have new results automatically sent to you.

Note: On smaller screens that don't show the sidebar, these options are available in the dropdown menu labelled "Year" right below the search button.

Select the "Case law" option on the homepage or in the side drawer on the search results page.

It finds documents similar to the given search result.

It's in the side drawer. The advanced search window lets you search in the author, title, and publication fields, as well as limit your search results by date.

Select the "Case law" option and do a keyword search over all jurisdictions. Then, click the "Select courts" link in the left sidebar on the search results page.

Tip: To quickly search a frequently used selection of courts, bookmark a search results page with the desired selection.

Access to articles

For each Scholar search result, we try to find a version of the article that you can read. These access links are labelled [PDF] or [HTML] and appear to the right of the search result. For example:

A paper that you need to read

Access links cover a wide variety of ways in which articles may be available to you - articles that your library subscribes to, open access articles, free-to-read articles from publishers, preprints, articles in repositories, etc.

When you are on a campus network, access links automatically include your library subscriptions and direct you to subscribed versions of articles. On-campus access links cover subscriptions from primary publishers as well as aggregators.

Off-campus access

Off-campus access links let you take your library subscriptions with you when you are at home or traveling. You can read subscribed articles when you are off-campus just as easily as when you are on-campus. Off-campus access links work by recording your subscriptions when you visit Scholar while on-campus, and looking up the recorded subscriptions later when you are off-campus.

We use the recorded subscriptions to provide you with the same subscribed access links as you see on campus. We also indicate your subscription access to participating publishers so that they can allow you to read the full-text of these articles without logging in or using a proxy. The recorded subscription information expires after 30 days and is automatically deleted.

In addition to Google Scholar search results, off-campus access links can also appear on articles from publishers participating in the off-campus subscription access program. Look for links labeled [PDF] or [HTML] on the right hand side of article pages.

Anne Author , John Doe , Jane Smith , Someone Else

In this fascinating paper, we investigate various topics that would be of interest to you. We also describe new methods relevant to your project, and attempt to address several questions which you would also like to know the answer to. Lastly, we analyze …

You can disable off-campus access links on the Scholar settings page . Disabling off-campus access links will turn off recording of your library subscriptions. It will also turn off indicating subscription access to participating publishers. Once off-campus access links are disabled, you may need to identify and configure an alternate mechanism (e.g., an institutional proxy or VPN) to access your library subscriptions while off-campus.

Email Alerts

Do a search for the topic of interest, e.g., "M Theory"; click the envelope icon in the sidebar of the search results page; enter your email address, and click "Create alert". We'll then periodically email you newly published papers that match your search criteria.

No, you can enter any email address of your choice. If the email address isn't a Google account or doesn't match your Google account, then we'll email you a verification link, which you'll need to click to start receiving alerts.

This works best if you create a public profile , which is free and quick to do. Once you get to the homepage with your photo, click "Follow" next to your name, select "New citations to my articles", and click "Done". We will then email you when we find new articles that cite yours.

Search for the title of your paper, e.g., "Anti de Sitter space and holography"; click on the "Cited by" link at the bottom of the search result; and then click on the envelope icon in the left sidebar of the search results page.

First, do a search for your colleague's name, and see if they have a Scholar profile. If they do, click on it, click the "Follow" button next to their name, select "New articles by this author", and click "Done".

If they don't have a profile, do a search by author, e.g., [author:s-hawking], and click on the mighty envelope in the left sidebar of the search results page. If you find that several different people share the same name, you may need to add co-author names or topical keywords to limit results to the author you wish to follow.

We send the alerts right after we add new papers to Google Scholar. This usually happens several times a week, except that our search robots meticulously observe holidays.

There's a link to cancel the alert at the bottom of every notification email.

If you created alerts using a Google account, you can manage them all here . If you're not using a Google account, you'll need to unsubscribe from the individual alerts and subscribe to the new ones.

Google Scholar library

Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by adding labels, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want - at any time and from anywhere. You decide what goes into your library, and we’ll keep the links up to date.

You get all the goodies that come with Scholar search results - links to PDF and to your university's subscriptions, formatted citations, citing articles, and more!

Library help

Find the article you want to add in Google Scholar and click the “Save” button under the search result.

Click “My library” at the top of the page or in the side drawer to view all articles in your library. To search the full text of these articles, enter your query as usual in the search box.

Find the article you want to remove, and then click the “Delete” button under it.

• To add a label to an article, find the article in your library, click the “Label” button under it, select the label you want to apply, and click “Done”.
• To view all the articles with a specific label, click the label name in the left sidebar of your library page.
• To remove a label from an article, click the “Label” button under it, deselect the label you want to remove, and click “Done”.
• To add, edit, or delete labels, click “Manage labels” in the left column of your library page.

Only you can see the articles in your library. If you create a Scholar profile and make it public, then the articles in your public profile (and only those articles) will be visible to everyone.

Your profile contains all the articles you have written yourself. It’s a way to present your work to others, as well as to keep track of citations to it. Your library is a way to organize the articles that you’d like to read or cite, not necessarily the ones you’ve written.

Citation Export

Click the "Cite" button under the search result and then select your bibliography manager at the bottom of the popup. We currently support BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, and RefWorks.

Err, no, please respect our robots.txt when you access Google Scholar using automated software. As the wearers of crawler's shoes and webmaster's hat, we cannot recommend adherence to web standards highly enough.

Sorry, we're unable to provide bulk access. You'll need to make an arrangement directly with the source of the data you're interested in. Keep in mind that a lot of the records in Google Scholar come from commercial subscription services.

Sorry, we can only show up to 1,000 results for any particular search query. Try a different query to get more results.

Content Coverage

Google Scholar includes journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies and university repositories, as well as scholarly articles available anywhere across the web. Google Scholar also includes court opinions and patents.

We index research articles and abstracts from most major academic publishers and repositories worldwide, including both free and subscription sources. To check current coverage of a specific source in Google Scholar, search for a sample of their article titles in quotes.

While we try to be comprehensive, it isn't possible to guarantee uninterrupted coverage of any particular source. We index articles from sources all over the web and link to these websites in our search results. If one of these websites becomes unavailable to our search robots or to a large number of web users, we have to remove it from Google Scholar until it becomes available again.

Our meticulous search robots generally try to index every paper from every website they visit, including most major sources and also many lesser known ones.

That said, Google Scholar is primarily a search of academic papers. Shorter articles, such as book reviews, news sections, editorials, announcements and letters, may or may not be included. Untitled documents and documents without authors are usually not included. Website URLs that aren't available to our search robots or to the majority of web users are, obviously, not included either. Nor do we include websites that require you to sign up for an account, install a browser plugin, watch four colorful ads, and turn around three times and say coo-coo before you can read the listing of titles scanned at 10 DPI... You get the idea, we cover academic papers from sensible websites.

That's usually because we index many of these papers from other websites, such as the websites of their primary publishers. The "site:" operator currently only searches the primary version of each paper.

It could also be that the papers are located on examplejournals.gov, not on example.gov. Please make sure you're searching for the "right" website.

That said, the best way to check coverage of a specific source is to search for a sample of their papers using the title of the paper.

Ahem, we index papers, not journals. You should also ask about our coverage of universities, research groups, proteins, seminal breakthroughs, and other dimensions that are of interest to users. All such questions are best answered by searching for a statistical sample of papers that has the property of interest - journal, author, protein, etc. Many coverage comparisons are available if you search for [allintitle:"google scholar"], but some of them are more statistically valid than others.

Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read published opinions of US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791. In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available.

Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

We normally add new papers several times a week. However, updates to existing records take 6-9 months to a year or longer, because in order to update our records, we need to first recrawl them from the source website. For many larger websites, the speed at which we can update their records is limited by the crawl rate that they allow.

Inclusion and Corrections

We apologize, and we assure you the error was unintentional. Automated extraction of information from articles in diverse fields can be tricky, so an error sometimes sneaks through.

Please write to the owner of the website where the erroneous search result is coming from, and encourage them to provide correct bibliographic data to us, as described in the technical guidelines . Once the data is corrected on their website, it usually takes 6-9 months to a year or longer for it to be updated in Google Scholar. We appreciate your help and your patience.

If you can't find your papers when you search for them by title and by author, please refer your publisher to our technical guidelines .

You can also deposit your papers into your institutional repository or put their PDF versions on your personal website, but please follow your publisher's requirements when you do so. See our technical guidelines for more details on the inclusion process.

We normally add new papers several times a week; however, it might take us some time to crawl larger websites, and corrections to already included papers can take 6-9 months to a year or longer.

Google Scholar generally reflects the state of the web as it is currently visible to our search robots and to the majority of users. When you're searching for relevant papers to read, you wouldn't want it any other way!

If your citation counts have gone down, chances are that either your paper or papers that cite it have either disappeared from the web entirely, or have become unavailable to our search robots, or, perhaps, have been reformatted in a way that made it difficult for our automated software to identify their bibliographic data and references. If you wish to correct this, you'll need to identify the specific documents with indexing problems and ask your publisher to fix them. Please refer to the technical guidelines .

Please do let us know . Please include the URL for the opinion, the corrected information and a source where we can verify the correction.

We're only able to make corrections to court opinions that are hosted on our own website. For corrections to academic papers, books, dissertations and other third-party material, click on the search result in question and contact the owner of the website where the document came from. For corrections to books from Google Book Search, click on the book's title and locate the link to provide feedback at the bottom of the book's page.

General Questions

These are articles which other scholarly articles have referred to, but which we haven't found online. To exclude them from your search results, uncheck the "include citations" box on the left sidebar.

First, click on links labeled [PDF] or [HTML] to the right of the search result's title. Also, check out the "All versions" link at the bottom of the search result.

Second, if you're affiliated with a university, using a computer on campus will often let you access your library's online subscriptions. Look for links labeled with your library's name to the right of the search result's title. Also, see if there's a link to the full text on the publisher's page with the abstract.

Keep in mind that final published versions are often only available to subscribers, and that some articles are not available online at all. Good luck!

Technically, your web browser remembers your settings in a "cookie" on your computer's disk, and sends this cookie to our website along with every search. Check that your browser isn't configured to discard our cookies. Also, check if disabling various proxies or overly helpful privacy settings does the trick. Either way, your settings are stored on your computer, not on our servers, so a long hard look at your browser's preferences or internet options should help cure the machine's forgetfulness.

Not even close. That phrase is our acknowledgement that much of scholarly research involves building on what others have already discovered. It's taken from Sir Isaac Newton's famous quote, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

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Thomas Vanhoutte

Personal website and blog

Submit academic research paper to Google Scholar

You have worked many months to complete your thesis or academic paper and you have relied on existing knowledge to finalize your research. Now you want to make your work available to the public. Here is how to properly include your academic research (journal article, thesis, book, ) in the Google Scholar search engine.

Create your Google Scholar profile

From this page, you can create your Google Scholar profile page. Include as much information as possible, such as a profile picture, your website, affiliation and areas of interest. I would also recommend you to make your profile public.

Once your profile looks good, we can move on to actually adding your academic writings. From here on, you have two options:

• You have only one or a few documents you want to submit, go for option 1
• You have many articles you want to add and are planning on writing even more in the future, go for option 2

Option 1 – Adding one by one

If you only want to include one document (let’s say, your master’s thesis), you can do so manually. Here are the steps:

• Go to this page to start adding a document manually.
• Choose the type of document (journal, conference, chapter, book, thesis, patent, court case or other).
• Fill in all the details about your article (title, author(s), publication date(s), volume, publisher, institution).

Click save and if you filled in everything correctly, you will see the message ‘Added article to your profile’. Congratulations!

Option 2 – Submit a website with all your work

In case you have an academic career and you have a list of work on your (academic or personal) website, option 2 is more suitable for you.

Google has guidelines to help you index your website that contains your academic work. Here are the steps you should follow to successfully include all of your work at once:

• Go to this page  and pick the type of website you are submitting. In my case, I choose ‘Personal publications’.
• Read and check the check-boxes that apply to you, such as ‘My inclusion request is for my personal publications’.
• Fill in the requested details, whereby the your webpage with academic articles should be filled in by ‘List of publications page’.
• Lastly, you are asked to include one or more article examples. So, paste the direct link to on or more of your PDFs there.

click submit and you are greeted with this message

Thanks for submitting your website to Google Scholar. Our crawl team is working hard to add new content as quickly as possible, and we appreciate your assistance. Please keep in mind that bibliographic data is extracted from your pages by automatic software. If you aren’t satisfied with the accuracy of your listings, please refer to our technical guidelines at http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html for ways to provide more accurate bibliographic data. An email detailing your submission has been sent to [email protected] . If your content meets our guidelines, you can generally expect to find it included within the Google Scholar results within 4-6 weeks.

Be patient, because as the message says, it can take up to a month or more before your articles are indexed. You will also receive an e-mail from  [email protected] with the data you just submitted.

Follow your own profile

Here is a great tip: follow your own Google Scholar profile!

Go to your own profile and at the top right, choose ‘follow’. Enter your e-mail and create the alert. If Google adds a new article to your profile, or a new citation, you will receive an e-mail alert.

This is an excellent way to receive a heads up if another researcher or student has cited your work in their academic writings. Maybe you can even reach out to the author(s) and talk about their research; a great way to expand your network.

Join the conversation

17 Comments

What are good open alternatives or extensions for Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search?

Mate is it equivalent to journal publishings.

Thanks a lot Mr. Thomas. I am much benefited by your informative article. The way and simplicity gave me enourament to read all and actually helped me to solve my problem. God bless you.

I like to add my journal in indexing of google scholar

Thanks Thomas for the link to “Submit a website with all your work”, that was a great tip.

I am genuinely happy to read this webpage posts which carries lots of valuable information, thanks for providing such statistics.

RESPECTED SIR, HOW CAN I UPLOAD MY ARTICLE WHICH IS NOT PUBLISHED ANYWHERE TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR, AS I AM A PHD SCHOLAR, THERE IS NO PROVISION TO UPLOAD AND SAVE OPTION IN MY SCHOLAR ACCOUNT. I JUST OPENED AN ACCOUNT SIR. PLS GUIDE ME IN THIS REGARD. THANK YOU SIR

how to add pdf file to google scholars?

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Name Course Professor Institution City and State location The Date  

TABLE OF CONTENT 1. Introduction…………………………………………………..4 1.1 Background Information………………………………….4 1.2 Definition of Corporate Governance……………………4 1.3 Importance of Corporate Governance…………………..4 1.4 Corporate Governance Theories………………………….5 1.5 Corporate Governance Codes……………………………5 2. Corporate Governance Mechanism………………………….6 2.1 Corporate boards………………………………………….7 2.1.1 Corporate board Structure……………………………7 2.1.2 Role of corporate board……………………………..8 2.2 Institutional Investors……………………………………9 2.2.1 Role of Institutional Investors ……………………..9 2.3 Other Corporate Governance Mechanisms……………10 3. Case Studies…………………………………………………10 3.1 Enron…………………………………………………….10 3.1.1 Background………………………………………..10 3.1.2 Enron’s Failure of Corporate Governance………..11 3.2 Reckitt Benckiser………………………………………12 3.2.1 Background………………………………………..12 3.2.2 Failure of Corporate Governance…………………12 3.3 Satyam………………………………………………….13 3.3.1 Background………………………………………..13 3.3.2 Failure of Corporate Governance ………………..13 3.4 WorldCom……………………………………………..14 3.4.1 Background……………………………………….14 3.4.2 Failure of Corporate Governance…………………14

4 Recommendations…………………………………………15 5 Conclusion…………………………………………………17 6 References…………………………………………………18   Introduction 1.1 Background Many scholars, economists, and other professions consider 2007- 2009 global financial crisis as the worst financial crisis ever since the great depression of 1930. The period characterized by the collapse of many financial institutions, massive bailouts, the economic downturn and finally the great recession was primarily attributed to the failure of corporate governance. As much as this was a low point in corporate governance, it also showed its importance not only to individual firms but to the world economy as a whole (Tricker & Tricker 2015). Never before has the notion that corporate boards and institutional investors are the most important corporate governance mechanisms in the firms with important implications for the sustainable long-term success of the firm been so vividly seen. From time immemorial as humans, we have always learned from our mistakes and the 2007-2009 was an eye opener especially to corporate governance. Before I can explain further on the notion, it is important to learn the basic aspects of corporate governance. 1.2 Definition of Corporate Governance Corporate governance in simple terms refers to the set of rules, processes, and practice through which a company is controlled and directed with (Solomon 2007). It involves balancing the interests of the organization with the interests of other parties such as the government, investors, lenders, suppliers, the community etc. 1.3 Importance of Corporate Governance When executed properly, corporate governance can help a company avoid certain risks such as lawsuits, fraud, and misappropriation of funds. In addition to that, good corporate governance helps in boosting the organization’s brand and reputation to the media, investors, suppliers, customers and the society as the whole. Furthermore, cooperate governance protects the financial interests of the individuals involved with the company such as the shareholders and the employees as explained by (Vitez, 2017).

1.4 Theories of Corporate Governance Corporate governance can be defined in many ways but when it comes to analyzing it, we do it through a framework of different theories. One of those theories is the agency theory which looks at the shareholders as the principals and the executives that have been hired to run the business as their agents. Another theory is the stewardship theory which looks at the executive as the stewards of the shareholders with both parties sharing the same goals. In addition to that, we have the resource dependent theory which considers the board as to be in existence so as to provide resources to the management with the aim of achieving the overall objectives of the business. Stakeholder theory comes from the assumptions that it is not just the shareholders who have an interest in the company but other parties too such as suppliers, the government, creditors among others (Farrar 2008). This means that this parties too can be affected by the success or failure of the business. Other theories of cooperate governance include transaction cost theory, political theory, and ethical related theories. 1.5 Corporate Governance Codes Introduction The code of governance over the years have originated for various reasons or in response to various circumstances. The first major release was in 1992 by Sir Adrian Cadbury popularly referred to ‘Cadbury Code’ titled “the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance”. Following serious revisions over the years, the code is nowadays administered by the Financial Reporting Council. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed the first internationally influential codes back in 1999 following a business advisory committee that was led by Irra Milstein. Boards that govern companies are influenced by several documents which include but not limited to articles of incorporation, by-laws, corporate governance guidelines, committee charters, and codes of conduct. When it comes to the United States, various federals laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act, federal laws as well as federal security laws in addition to regulations, rules, and guidance from SEC are used. These documents are meant to be used for the purpose of best practices and flexible working standards to safeguard the various parties that have an interest in the organization. In short, they basically outline the interaction between the board and management outlining the structure and the behavior of the board. The codes are normally contributed to by various individuals including investors, accounting firms, regulators, banks, corporate governance interest organizations, academics, and stock exchanges, among others.

Corporate Governance Mechanism Policies, control, and guidelines are vital for an adequate corporate governance mechanisms. An effective corporate governance mechanism will consist of a number of various mechanisms. The first level consists of internal mechanisms which monitor the business from within and take corrective measures when the business stray away from its set objectives. They include reporting lines that are clearly defined, systems that measure performance and systems for the smooth operation of the business. The next level is the external mechanisms which are controlled by those outside the business and serve the objectives of outsiders such as the regulators, government, financial institutions, and trade unions among others. The objectives of the external mechanism include proper debt management and legal compliance by the company in question. The last level consists of an audit of the entity’s financial statements by an independent auditor who generally works to serve both the internal and external parties that are involved with an organization to ensure that their interests are guided and that the management is doing everything properly. They also act as a second opinion to back up what the management is saying. 2.1 Corporate Boards The board generally consist of groups of individuals elected or nominated by shareholders in the annual general meeting. The board of directors normally act as a bridge between the company and the shareholders -it decides as a fiduciary with the aim of protecting the latter’s interests. This is the norm with a Public company even though nowadays most non-profit making organizations and private companies also have a board. Their main mandate is to make policies for corporate management and also to make decisions on major issues that affect the company. 2.1.1 Corporate Board Structure The structure of the board of directors is mainly guided by the company’s bylaws which sets out the structure, number of members, how often they meet etc. The most important element is that it should be able to balance both the interests of the management and Shareholders. The duties are regulated by the statutory laws, federal statutory laws, listing standards, common law and shareholder activism and litigation. The membership of the board normally constitutes independent directors, senior company executives, non-independent directors such as former senior executives of the company among others. Nasdaq rules require the majority of the board members to be independent and in they constitute up to 75% or more of the boards in 93 of the top 100 US companies. Most boards consist of 8 to 15 members. There are no age and nationality restrictions although in recent years gender balance has been emphasized. 2.1.2 Roles of the Corporate Boards The board’s primary role as discussed earlier is the fiduciary duty to safeguard the finances and the legal requirements of the entity. They do this by ensuring that the entity in questions does all that is required of it by the law, and the funds are properly used. Another role of the board of directors is setting up the mission and vision of the organization. In addition to that, they ensure that the management adheres and work towards achieving them. Over sighting the activities of members of the organization such as executives is another role of the corporate board. The board ensures that the management adheres to rules and regulations and do their work as prescribed. Other roles of the board of directors come up in the annual meetings where-by, they announce the annual dividends, oversee the appointment of key executives and amend the by-laws where it is necessary (Dimopoulos & Wagner, 2016). Other roles of the corporate board include setting up the strategy for the company for long-term survival, short-term gains and future exploration of opportunities that are likely to arise. This might also include setting up the structure of the company to ensure efficiency. The board, however, does not take part in the day to day running of the organization and thus serve another role of delegating the duties to the management. The board should also monitor, control functions and set up compensation plans for the executives. Last but definitely not least, the board helps in acquiring resources for the organization while ensuring continuity. With great power comes great responsibilities. The board must always use their powers for the right reason and do what is required of them by the shareholders of the company. The board must always carry out whatever they do in the full interest of the company, and in case there is a conflict of interest then the interests of the company should always come first. They must also carry out their task with due care minding the interests of both the shareholders and that of the employees. Other responsibilities of the board include acting as the court of appeal in case there are disputes, accessing the performance of the firm and enhancing the organization’s overall public image and brand name. 2.2 Institutional Investors An institutional investor is a person, persons or organization that pools money or provides funds to purchase securities, other investment assets, property or originate loans. They include financial institutions such as banks, Insurance companies, pension and hedge firms, investment advisors, commercial trusts and mutual funds. For a firm to grow, it requires resources inform of money which is provided by these institutional investors who get profits and interests as compensation for their troubles in taking the risk. The returns should exceed the fees and expenses of the investments and is compared against treasury bills which are considered to be risk-free. 2.2.1 Roles and Responsibilities of Institutional investors The best thing about institutional investors is the fact that they have expertise and knowledge to monitor the health and progress of the business. With this knowledge, they can provide the best advice the organization and also control the tendency of the management to put their interests first as opposed to the interests of the company. This active monitoring helps reduce misappropriation of funds and other forms of fraud (Gillan & Starks 2002, pp. 275-305) The institutional investors can act as a source of stability in hard times as was the case in the coal crisis in India recently. By offering additional funds, the institutional investors increase their stake and say in the company thus can push for better corporate governance. Another aspect related to this is the fact the institutional investors have a louder voice compared to minority investors. Most of the time when minority shareholders raise their concerns on corporate governance, they will rarely get addressed or at times get thwarted by the minorities which are not the case with institutional investors. 2.3 Other Corporate Governance Mechanism Other parties that are involved in corporate governance include the shareholders themselves who have the biggest interests as the main contributors of capital, the employees who get their incomes and job security from the good governance of the company, the government which gets taxes from the organization and the society as a whole which benefits from job creation, income distribution, corporate social responsibility activities of the firm among other benefits. Case Studies 3.1 Enron 3.1.1 Background The story of Enron was not only the largest bankruptcy case at the time but also the biggest audit failure. This was cited by many as the biggest corporate governance failure especially on the part of corporate boards and institutional investors. Enron was founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay who also triples up as the chairman and chief executive officer. This was after merging Houston Natural gas and Intermonth. Other key people involved with Enron included: Jeffrey Skiing who was the C.O.O, Andrew Fastow who was the CFO and Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche who was the once a vice chairman. From 1995 to 2000 Enron was in fact named America most innovative company by Fortune. In the mid-2000s at its peak, the shares of Enron were trading at $90.75 per share. By the end of November 2001, they were trading at less than $1 per share. This was when the shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit. Enron filed for bankruptcy on December second, 2001 with assets worth $63.4 billion making it the biggest bankruptcy scandal ever in American history at the time. At this stage, the shares were going at $0.26 per share. 3.1.2 Failure of Corporate Governance in Enron Lack of due care and skill from the board was one of the reasons why Enron failed. As submitted by S.Watkins, Kenneth Lay who was Enron’s chair, could not get what was being said to him in regards to the company having questionable accounting practices. This also showed lack of proper communication between the board and the executives. This was further elaborated by Jeffrey McMahon, the new Enron’s president who said it was virtually impossible to challenge the authorities at Enron. A culture of intimidation had also developed at the company with the likes of Ms. Watkins fearing to lose their jobs. The board literally failed in its role of directing. This showed some sort of conflict of interests where they were more than happy to receive high compensations without asking serious questions which would have led to a decrease in their personal bonuses. The management who carried out the day to running of the Enron misrepresented information by allocating Enron’s debts to its dubious partners. This also showed the lack of proper internal controls at Enron (Carberry & Zajac 2017, p.15134). The corporate investors also failed to properly supervise the company and advice accordingly. For example, according to an economist at Enron, it was important it was all mind games as it was important for the employees, investors, and analysts to believe that the stock will bounce back. Other corporate investors such as the two trustees of Enron’s 401(k) plan failed in their duties as they did not warn the plan participants despite a memo detailing the accounting malpractices. The institutional investors also had all the knowledge and expertise but failed to utilize them- they just sat back and believed whatever they were told. 3.2 Reckitt Benckiser 3.2.1 Background Reckitt Benckiser is a British multinational that produces consumer goods to do with hygien, health, and home products. The name comes from the merging of a United Kingdom company Reckitt & Coleman and Benckiser NV that was based in the Netherlands back in 1999. The most well-known products worldwide include Dettol and Strepsil. Reckitt Benckiser acquired Korean Oxy brand in 2001 which had been using polyhexamethathylene guanidine (PHMG) in a product since 1996. In 2011, PHMG was banned by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and prevention after a published report showed a link to lung damage and report. Several reports also came out supporting the Korean report, and at the height of this in 2016 a coalition of consumer groups came out for the total boycott of Reckitt Benckiser products after it had been linked to more than 500 deaths from a BBC report. 3.2.1 Failure of Corporate Governance Mechanism in Reckitt Benckiser In the case of corporate governance, the management and directors fail as a whole in doing their duty of due care and skill when acquiring the Korean Oxy brand. They had a duty to investigate and know what is in the product. They put the company’s financial interests before the safety of the consumers. In addition to that, several attempts were made by the board and management to suppress investigations instead of taking corrective measures. Even though this was mostly a failure by the management and board, institutional investors also had the power to ask questions. Despite the various reports, they were silent till there was outrage in the mass media. 3.3 Satyam 3.3.1 Background Satyam was India’s fourth largest computer service company in India which has a population of over 1 billion. It was even listed on New York Stock exchange in 2001 with revenues exceeding $1 billion. The founder, M. Raju Ramalinga who was also the chair was a highly regarded person in the business often gracing all the major corporate events. In 2008 Satyam won the coveted prize of the Golden Peacock Award for compliance issues and Risk Management in corporate governance. In 2009, M. Raju confessed that the company’s accounts had been falsified by a massive $1.47 billion (Bhasin 2005). In the same year, Satyam stock was banned from trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and the Golden Peacock Award stripped off. Mr. Raju was later convicted together with other senior members. 3.3.2 Failure of Corporate Governance Mechanisms The board at Satyam failed in their primary duty of due care and monitoring the activity of the business as they did not notice the discrepancy. This was so evident that the first order was to appoint a temporary board. The board also put their interests first at the expense of the company for financial gains as confessed by their chairman. Despite the amount that falsified being that large, the auditors who were Price Water House Coopers failed in their auditing duties as they did not report anything amiss despite having all the expertise and experience. They were even fined $6 million by the US stock exchange for not following the code of conduct and auditing standards in when offering their services to Satyam. Institutional investors also failed to raise questions or properly examine the financial statements. Furthermore, with their expertise, they should have pushed for compliance with the corporate code of governance. 3.4 Worldcom 3.4.1 Background Before filing for bankruptcy protection in 2002, WorldCom was the second largest long distance phone company in the United States. With assets totaling over $104 billion, $30 billion in revenues and over 60,000 employees WorldCom filed for bankruptcy protection on July 1, 2002. The company later wrote down more than 75% of the total assets with over 17,000 of the workers losing their jobs. Over the period between 1999-2002, WorldCom had deliberately overstated their income before tax by over $7 billion which was the main reason behind the falling from grace to grass. It is currently known as Verizon business or Verizon enterprise solution after being acquired by Verizon Communications and is slowly rebuilding and being integrated into the parent company. 3.4.2 Failure of corporate Mechanism in WorldCom The biggest failure of WorldCom was the fact that the board had failed in its structuring role. Over the years, it had acquired a lot of companies with even one accountant confessing that they would get calls from people they did not even know existed. The departments were also not even properly structured for efficient working and were very decentralized. For example, the finance department was in Mississippi; the network operations were in Texas, the human resource in Florida and the legal department in Washington DC. This provided a challenge of communication as each department developed their ways of doing things. Apart from that, the difference in management style and the culture that was developed of not questioning seniors was a discouragement for employees who wanted to correct any issues that arose. In fact, there was a deliberate attempt by the management to hide vital financial issues as explained by Buddy Yates, the director of general accounting who was told he would be thrown outside the window in case he had shown the numbers to the auditors by Gene Morse, a senior manager. The employees also put their self-interests above the interest of the company as loyal employees were often compensated above the company’s approved salaries and bonus packages by Ebbers and Sullivan. The biggest failure was the board however as they failed terribly in all their roles and responsibilities including due care, supervision, bridging the gap between management and shareholder among others. In the case of institutional investors, they also failed terribly. No one raised a question on the structure of the firm or why the firm was highly decentralized. The increase in the salaries and compensation for the ‘loyal’ employees in the finance and accounting department should also have raised questions. Institutional investors should have also used their expertise to confirm the information that was being provided to them. Recommendations on Improving the Quality Of Corporate Governance Corporates Boards Should Meet Regularly: The corporates boards do not take part in the day to day running of the business, but they have a supervisory role. To carry out the tasks effectively, they need to meet more often (Christensen et al 2015, pp.133-164) Division of Responsibilities: The duties and responsibilities of a firm should be properly defined and allocated within an organization. This will help in reducing conflicts and also knowing who is liable and for what. This will also help enhance effective communication within an organization. Stronger Internal Controls: Controls in an organization should start from within for effective corporate governance. The controls include the supervision of seniors, physical controls, controls among others. Transparency: Corporate governance is all about transparency. Transparency does not mean revealing the companies but being honest in its activities. In case there is a loss it should be stated and corrective measures to correct it taken, Proper succession planning: One of the best attributes is that its life is not limited to that of the owners or directors. A proper succession plan should, therefore, be set in place to ensure that the values of the company that encourages proper corporate governance are passed from one generation to the other within the company Proper training of directors: The directors of the company are the eyes of the society and shareholders in the business. They need to be properly trained to carry out their tasks effectively as is required of them. Another option is to select a board of directors that is highly qualified in the different fields that the business is engaged in. Independent members increase: Any organization that is interested in improving its corporate governance should try as much as possible to increase the list of independent parties in its running. The independent parties with no direct relation can view the business from a better neutral point (Klapper & Love 2002, pp.703-728) Conclusion It is crystal clear from the discussions above that the corporate governance mechanisms such as corporate boards and institutional boards are the backbone for the survival of any company. From the cases discussed above, we can see the consequences of bad corporate governance and the fact that it does not matter how big the company is. In addition to that, there is a failure the many bodies that are meant to supervise corporate governance. Corporate governance board needs to do more than just take the words of corporations. It is an understatement to say that corporate governance should be a priority, it should actually be a prerequisite (Lebedeva et al 2016). 

References Bhasin, M.L., 2015. Corporate accounting fraud: A case study of Satyam Computers Limited. Carberry, E. and Zajac, E., 2017, January. How US Corporations Changed Executive Compensation after Enron: Substance and Symbol. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 15134). Academy of Management Christensen, J., Kent, P., Routledge, J. and Stewart, J., 2015. Do corporate governance recommendations improve the performance and accountability of small listed companies?. Accounting & Finance, 55(1), pp.133-164. Dimopoulos, T. and Wagner, H.F., 2016. Corporate Governance and CEO Turnover Decisions. Farrar, J., 2008. Corporate governance: theories, principles and practice. Oxford University Press Gillan, S.L. and Starks, L.T., 2000. Corporate governance proposals and shareholder activism: The role of institutional investors. Journal of financial Economics, 57(2), pp.275-305. Ilya, P., 2015. inc. [Online] Available at: http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/14-highly-effective-ways-to-motivate-employees.html [Accessed 27 January 2018].

Klapper, L.F. and Love, I., 2004. Corporate governance, investor protection, and performance in emerging markets. Journal of corporate Finance, 10(5), pp.703-728. Lebedeva, T.E., Akhmetshin, E.M., Dzagoyeva, M.R., Kobersy, I.S. and Ikoev, S.K., 2016. Corporate governance issues and control in conditions of unstable capital risk. International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 6(1S). Solomon, J., 2007. Corporate governance and accountability. John Wiley & Sons. Tricker, R.B. and Tricker, R.I., 2015. Corporate governance: Principles, policies, and practices. Oxford University Press, USA. Vitez, O., 2017. Bizfluent. [Online] Available at: https://bizfluent.com/facts-6884459-importance-corporate governance.html [Accessed 21 February 2018].

Hi, we have the scientific journal: https://journal.scsa.ge/

we are submitting it to google scholar manually already for one year, but it is not indexed still in scholar.

What can we do?

Hi, how to upload my thesis into google or share

hello, how to upload my thesis into google or share .

An impressive share! I’ve just forwarded this onto a friend who was doing a little research on this. And he actually bought me breakfast simply because I found it for him… lol. So let me reword this…. Thanks for the meal!! But yeah, thanks for spending time to discuss this subject here on your web site.

I am interested to publish my articles on Goodle scholar but I have know clear idea about the steps to follow. Please link me

Thanks, Thomas your article help me to explore google scholar differently thanks a lots.

Thanks, friend. I wanted to publish my marketing papers over there. Your article helped. Thanks again.

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18 Google Scholar tips all students should know

Dec 13, 2022

[[read-time]] min read

Think of this guide as your personal research assistant.

“It’s hard to pick your favorite kid,” Anurag Acharya says when I ask him to talk about a favorite Google Scholar feature he’s worked on. “I work on product, engineering, operations, partnerships,” he says. He’s been doing it for 18 years, which as of this month, happens to be how long Google Scholar has been around.

Google Scholar is also one of Google’s longest-running services. The comprehensive database of research papers, legal cases and other scholarly publications was the fourth Search service Google launched, Anurag says. In honor of this very important tool’s 18th anniversary, I asked Anurag to share 18 things you can do in Google Scholar that you might have missed.

1. Copy article citations in the style of your choice.

With a simple click of the cite button (which sits below an article entry), Google Scholar will give you a ready-to-use citation for the article in five styles, including APA, MLA and Chicago. You can select and copy the one you prefer.

2. Dig deeper with related searches.

Google Scholar’s related searches can help you pinpoint your research; you’ll see them show up on a page in between article results. Anurag describes it like this: You start with a big topic — like “cancer” — and follow up with a related search like “lung cancer” or “colon cancer” to explore specific kinds of cancer.

Related searches can help you find what you’re looking for.

3. And don’t miss the related articles.

This is another great way to find more papers similar to one you found helpful — you can find this link right below an entry.

4. Read the papers you find.

Scholarly articles have long been available only by subscription. To keep you from having to log in every time you see a paper you’re interested in, Scholar works with libraries and publishers worldwide to integrate their subscriptions directly into its search results. Look for a link marked [PDF] or [HTML]. This also includes preprints and other free-to-read versions of papers.

5. Access Google Scholar tools from anywhere on the web with the Scholar Button browser extension.

The Scholar Button browser extension is sort of like a mini version of Scholar that can move around the web with you. If you’re searching for something, hitting the extension icon will show you studies about that topic, and if you’re reading a study, you can hit that same button to find a version you read, create a citation or to save it to your Scholar library.

Install the Scholar Button Chrome browser extension to access Google Scholar from anywhere on the web.

6. Learn more about authors through Scholar profiles.

There are many times when you’ll want to know more about the researchers behind the ideas you’re looking into. You can do this by clicking on an author’s name when it’s hyperlinked in a search result. You’ll find all of their work as well as co-authors, articles they’re cited in and so on. You can also follow authors from their Scholar profile to get email updates about their work, or about when and where their work is cited.

7. Easily find topic experts.

One last thing about author profiles: If there are topics listed below an author’s name on their profile, you can click on these areas of expertise and you’ll see a page of more authors who are researching and publishing on these topics, too.

8. Search for court opinions with the “Case law” button.

Scholar is the largest free database of U.S. court opinions. When you search for something using Google Scholar, you can select the “Case law” button below the search box to see legal cases your keywords are referenced in. You can read the opinions and a summary of what they established.

9. See how those court opinions have been cited.

If you want to better understand the impact of a particular piece of case law, you can select “How Cited,” which is below an entry, to see how and where the document has been cited. For example, here is the How Cited page for Marbury v. Madison , a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established that courts can strike down unconstitutional laws or statutes.

10. Understand how a legal opinion depends on another.

When you’re looking at how case laws are cited within Google Scholar, click on “Cited by” and check out the horizontal bars next to the different results. They indicate how relevant the cited opinion is in the court decision it’s cited within. You will see zero, one, two or three bars before each result. Those bars indicate the extent to which the new opinion depends on and refers to the cited case.

In the Cited by page for New York Times Company v. Sullivan, court cases with three bars next to their name heavily reference the original case. One bar indicates less reliance.

11. Sign up for Google Scholar alerts.

Want to stay up to date on a specific topic? Create an alert for a Google Scholar search for your topics and you’ll get email updates similar to Google Search alerts. Another way to keep up with research in your area is to follow new articles by leading researchers. Go to their profiles and click “Follow.” If you’re a junior grad student, you may consider following articles related to your advisor’s research topics, for instance.

12. Save interesting articles to your library.

It’s easy to go down fascinating rabbit hole after rabbit hole in Google Scholar. Don’t lose track of your research and use the save option that pops up under search results so articles will be in your library for later reading.

13. Keep your library organized with labels.

Labels aren’t only for Gmail! You can create labels within your Google Scholar library so you can keep your research organized. Click on “My library,” and then the “Manage labels…” option to create a new label.

14. If you’re a researcher, share your research with all your colleagues.

Many research funding agencies around the world now mandate that funded articles should become publicly free to read within a year of publication — or sooner. Scholar profiles list such articles to help researchers keep track of them and open up access to ones that are still locked down. That means you can immediately see what is currently available from researchers you’re interested in and how many of their papers will soon be publicly free to read.

15. Look through Scholar’s annual top publications and papers.

Every year, Google Scholar releases the top publications based on the most-cited papers. That list (available in 11 languages) will also take you to each publication’s top papers — this takes into account the “h index,” which measures how much impact an article has had. It’s an excellent place to start a research journey as well as get an idea about the ideas and discoveries researchers are currently focused on.

16. Get even more specific with Advanced Search.

Click on the hamburger icon on the upper left-hand corner and select Advanced Search to fine-tune your queries. For example, articles with exact words or a particular phrase in the title or articles from a particular journal and so on.

17. Find extra help on Google Scholar’s help page.

It might sound obvious, but there’s a wealth of useful information to be found here — like how often the database is updated, tips on formatting searches and how you can use your library subscriptions when you’re off-campus (looking at you, college students!). Oh, and you’ll even learn the origin of that quote on Google Scholar’s home page.

18. Keep up with Google Scholar news.

Don’t forget to check out the Google Scholar blog for updates on new features and tips for using this tool even better.

Related stories

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While Sandel argues that pursuing perfection through genetic engineering would decrease our sense of humility, he claims that the sense of solidarity we would lose is also important.

This thesis summarizes several points in Sandel’s argument, but it does not make a claim about how we should understand his argument. A reader who read Sandel’s argument would not also need to read an essay based on this descriptive thesis.  

Broad thesis (arguable, but difficult to support with evidence) 

Michael Sandel’s arguments about genetic engineering do not take into consideration all the relevant issues.

This is an arguable claim because it would be possible to argue against it by saying that Michael Sandel’s arguments do take all of the relevant issues into consideration. But the claim is too broad. Because the thesis does not specify which “issues” it is focused on—or why it matters if they are considered—readers won’t know what the rest of the essay will argue, and the writer won’t know what to focus on. If there is a particular issue that Sandel does not address, then a more specific version of the thesis would include that issue—hand an explanation of why it is important.  

Arguable thesis with analytical claim 

While Sandel argues persuasively that our instinct to “remake” (54) ourselves into something ever more perfect is a problem, his belief that we can always draw a line between what is medically necessary and what makes us simply “better than well” (51) is less convincing.

This is an arguable analytical claim. To argue for this claim, the essay writer will need to show how evidence from the article itself points to this interpretation. It’s also a reasonable scope for a thesis because it can be supported with evidence available in the text and is neither too broad nor too narrow.  

Arguable thesis with normative claim 

Given Sandel’s argument against genetic enhancement, we should not allow parents to decide on using Human Growth Hormone for their children.

This thesis tells us what we should do about a particular issue discussed in Sandel’s article, but it does not tell us how we should understand Sandel’s argument.  

Questions to ask about your thesis 

• Is the thesis truly arguable? Does it speak to a genuine dilemma in the source, or would most readers automatically agree with it?  
• Is the thesis too obvious? Again, would most or all readers agree with it without needing to see your argument?  
• Is the thesis complex enough to require a whole essay's worth of argument?  
• Is the thesis supportable with evidence from the text rather than with generalizations or outside research?  
• Would anyone want to read a paper in which this thesis was developed? That is, can you explain what this paper is adding to our understanding of a problem, question, or topic?
• picture_as_pdf Thesis

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What is a thesis | A Complete Guide with Examples

Table of Contents

A thesis is a comprehensive academic paper based on your original research that presents new findings, arguments, and ideas of your study. It’s typically submitted at the end of your master’s degree or as a capstone of your bachelor’s degree.

However, writing a thesis can be laborious, especially for beginners. From the initial challenge of pinpointing a compelling research topic to organizing and presenting findings, the process is filled with potential pitfalls.

Therefore, to help you, this guide talks about what is a thesis. Additionally, it offers revelations and methodologies to transform it from an overwhelming task to a manageable and rewarding academic milestone.

What is a thesis?

A thesis is an in-depth research study that identifies a particular topic of inquiry and presents a clear argument or perspective about that topic using evidence and logic.

Writing a thesis showcases your ability of critical thinking, gathering evidence, and making a compelling argument. Integral to these competencies is thorough research, which not only fortifies your propositions but also confers credibility to your entire study.

Furthermore, there's another phenomenon you might often confuse with the thesis: the ' working thesis .' However, they aren't similar and shouldn't be used interchangeably.

A working thesis, often referred to as a preliminary or tentative thesis, is an initial version of your thesis statement. It serves as a draft or a starting point that guides your research in its early stages.

As you research more and gather more evidence, your initial thesis (aka working thesis) might change. It's like a starting point that can be adjusted as you learn more. It's normal for your main topic to change a few times before you finalize it.

While a thesis identifies and provides an overarching argument, the key to clearly communicating the central point of that argument lies in writing a strong thesis statement.

What is a thesis statement?

A strong thesis statement (aka thesis sentence) is a concise summary of the main argument or claim of the paper. It serves as a critical anchor in any academic work, succinctly encapsulating the primary argument or main idea of the entire paper.

Typically found within the introductory section, a strong thesis statement acts as a roadmap of your thesis, directing readers through your arguments and findings. By delineating the core focus of your investigation, it offers readers an immediate understanding of the context and the gravity of your study.

Furthermore, an effectively crafted thesis statement can set forth the boundaries of your research, helping readers anticipate the specific areas of inquiry you are addressing.

Different types of thesis statements

A good thesis statement is clear, specific, and arguable. Therefore, it is necessary for you to choose the right type of thesis statement for your academic papers.

Thesis statements can be classified based on their purpose and structure. Here are the primary types of thesis statements:

Argumentative (or Persuasive) thesis statement

Purpose : To convince the reader of a particular stance or point of view by presenting evidence and formulating a compelling argument.

Example : Reducing plastic use in daily life is essential for environmental health.

Analytical thesis statement

Purpose : To break down an idea or issue into its components and evaluate it.

Example : By examining the long-term effects, social implications, and economic impact of climate change, it becomes evident that immediate global action is necessary.

Expository (or Descriptive) thesis statement

Purpose : To explain a topic or subject to the reader.

Example : The Great Depression, spanning the 1930s, was a severe worldwide economic downturn triggered by a stock market crash, bank failures, and reduced consumer spending.

Cause and effect thesis statement

Purpose : To demonstrate a cause and its resulting effect.

Example : Overuse of smartphones can lead to impaired sleep patterns, reduced face-to-face social interactions, and increased levels of anxiety.

Compare and contrast thesis statement

Purpose : To highlight similarities and differences between two subjects.

Example : "While both novels '1984' and 'Brave New World' delve into dystopian futures, they differ in their portrayal of individual freedom, societal control, and the role of technology."

When you write a thesis statement , it's important to ensure clarity and precision, so the reader immediately understands the central focus of your work.

What is the difference between a thesis and a thesis statement?

While both terms are frequently used interchangeably, they have distinct meanings.

A thesis refers to the entire research document, encompassing all its chapters and sections. In contrast, a thesis statement is a brief assertion that encapsulates the central argument of the research.

Here’s an in-depth differentiation table of a thesis and a thesis statement.

Now, to craft a compelling thesis, it's crucial to adhere to a specific structure. Let’s break down these essential components that make up a thesis structure

15 components of a thesis structure

Navigating a thesis can be daunting. However, understanding its structure can make the process more manageable.

Here are the key components or different sections of a thesis structure:

Your thesis begins with the title page. It's not just a formality but the gateway to your research.

Here, you'll prominently display the necessary information about you (the author) and your institutional details.

• Title of your thesis
• Your full name
• Your department
• Your institution and degree program
• Your submission date
• Your Supervisor's name (in some cases)
• Your Department or faculty (in some cases)
• Your University's logo (in some cases)
• Your Student ID (in some cases)

In a concise manner, you'll have to summarize the critical aspects of your research in typically no more than 200-300 words.

This includes the problem statement, methodology, key findings, and conclusions. For many, the abstract will determine if they delve deeper into your work, so ensure it's clear and compelling.

Acknowledgments

Research is rarely a solitary endeavor. In the acknowledgments section, you have the chance to express gratitude to those who've supported your journey.

This might include advisors, peers, institutions, or even personal sources of inspiration and support. It's a personal touch, reflecting the humanity behind the academic rigor.

Table of contents

A roadmap for your readers, the table of contents lists the chapters, sections, and subsections of your thesis.

By providing page numbers, you allow readers to navigate your work easily, jumping to sections that pique their interest.

List of figures and tables

Research often involves data, and presenting this data visually can enhance understanding. This section provides an organized listing of all figures and tables in your thesis.

It's a visual index, ensuring that readers can quickly locate and reference your graphical data.

Introduction

Here's where you introduce your research topic, articulate the research question or objective, and outline the significance of your study.

• Present the research topic : Clearly articulate the central theme or subject of your research.
• Background information : Ground your research topic, providing any necessary context or background information your readers might need to understand the significance of your study.
• Define the scope : Clearly delineate the boundaries of your research, indicating what will and won't be covered.
• Literature review : Introduce any relevant existing research on your topic, situating your work within the broader academic conversation and highlighting where your research fits in.
• State the research Question(s) or objective(s) : Clearly articulate the primary questions or objectives your research aims to address.
• Outline the study's structure : Give a brief overview of how the subsequent sections of your work will unfold, guiding your readers through the journey ahead.

The introduction should captivate your readers, making them eager to delve deeper into your research journey.

Literature review section

Your study correlates with existing research. Therefore, in the literature review section, you'll engage in a dialogue with existing knowledge, highlighting relevant studies, theories, and findings.

It's here that you identify gaps in the current knowledge, positioning your research as a bridge to new insights.

To streamline this process, consider leveraging AI tools. For example, the SciSpace literature review tool enables you to efficiently explore and delve into research papers, simplifying your literature review journey.

Methodology

In the research methodology section, you’ll detail the tools, techniques, and processes you employed to gather and analyze data. This section will inform the readers about how you approached your research questions and ensures the reproducibility of your study.

Here's a breakdown of what it should encompass:

• Research Design : Describe the overall structure and approach of your research. Are you conducting a qualitative study with in-depth interviews? Or is it a quantitative study using statistical analysis? Perhaps it's a mixed-methods approach?
• Data Collection : Detail the methods you used to gather data. This could include surveys, experiments, observations, interviews, archival research, etc. Mention where you sourced your data, the duration of data collection, and any tools or instruments used.
• Sampling : If applicable, explain how you selected participants or data sources for your study. Discuss the size of your sample and the rationale behind choosing it.
• Data Analysis : Describe the techniques and tools you used to process and analyze the data. This could range from statistical tests in quantitative research to thematic analysis in qualitative research.
• Validity and Reliability : Address the steps you took to ensure the validity and reliability of your findings to ensure that your results are both accurate and consistent.
• Ethical Considerations : Highlight any ethical issues related to your research and the measures you took to address them, including — informed consent, confidentiality, and data storage and protection measures.

Moreover, different research questions necessitate different types of methodologies. For instance:

• Experimental methodology : Often used in sciences, this involves a controlled experiment to discern causality.
• Qualitative methodology : Employed when exploring patterns or phenomena without numerical data. Methods can include interviews, focus groups, or content analysis.
• Quantitative methodology : Concerned with measurable data and often involves statistical analysis. Surveys and structured observations are common tools here.
• Mixed methods : As the name implies, this combines both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

The Methodology section isn’t just about detailing the methods but also justifying why they were chosen. The appropriateness of the methods in addressing your research question can significantly impact the credibility of your findings.

Results (or Findings)

This section presents the outcomes of your research. It's crucial to note that the nature of your results may vary; they could be quantitative, qualitative, or a mix of both.

Quantitative results often present statistical data, showcasing measurable outcomes, and they benefit from tables, graphs, and figures to depict these data points.

Qualitative results , on the other hand, might delve into patterns, themes, or narratives derived from non-numerical data, such as interviews or observations.

Regardless of the nature of your results, clarity is essential. This section is purely about presenting the data without offering interpretations — that comes later in the discussion.

In the discussion section, the raw data transforms into valuable insights.

Start by revisiting your research question and contrast it with the findings. How do your results expand, constrict, or challenge current academic conversations?

Dive into the intricacies of the data, guiding the reader through its implications. Detail potential limitations transparently, signaling your awareness of the research's boundaries. This is where your academic voice should be resonant and confident.

Practical implications (Recommendation) section

Based on the insights derived from your research, this section provides actionable suggestions or proposed solutions.

Whether aimed at industry professionals or the general public, recommendations translate your academic findings into potential real-world actions. They help readers understand the practical implications of your work and how it can be applied to effect change or improvement in a given field.

When crafting recommendations, it's essential to ensure they're feasible and rooted in the evidence provided by your research. They shouldn't merely be aspirational but should offer a clear path forward, grounded in your findings.

The conclusion provides closure to your research narrative.

It's not merely a recap but a synthesis of your main findings and their broader implications. Reconnect with the research questions or hypotheses posited at the beginning, offering clear answers based on your findings.

Reflect on the broader contributions of your study, considering its impact on the academic community and potential real-world applications.

Lastly, the conclusion should leave your readers with a clear understanding of the value and impact of your study.

References (or Bibliography)

Every theory you've expounded upon, every data point you've cited, and every methodological precedent you've followed finds its acknowledgment here.

In references, it's crucial to ensure meticulous consistency in formatting, mirroring the specific guidelines of the chosen citation style .

Proper referencing helps to avoid plagiarism , gives credit to original ideas, and allows readers to explore topics of interest. Moreover, it situates your work within the continuum of academic knowledge.

To properly cite the sources used in the study, you can rely on online citation generator tools  to generate accurate citations!

Here’s more on how you can cite your sources.

Often, the depth of research produces a wealth of material that, while crucial, can make the core content of the thesis cumbersome. The appendix is where you mention extra information that supports your research but isn't central to the main text.

Whether it's raw datasets, detailed procedural methodologies, extended case studies, or any other ancillary material, the appendices ensure that these elements are archived for reference without breaking the main narrative's flow.

For thorough researchers and readers keen on meticulous details, the appendices provide a treasure trove of insights.

Glossary (optional)

In academics, specialized terminologies, and jargon are inevitable. However, not every reader is versed in every term.

The glossary, while optional, is a critical tool for accessibility. It's a bridge ensuring that even readers from outside the discipline can access, understand, and appreciate your work.

By defining complex terms and providing context, you're inviting a wider audience to engage with your research, enhancing its reach and impact.

Remember, while these components provide a structured framework, the essence of your thesis lies in the originality of your ideas, the rigor of your research, and the clarity of your presentation.

As you craft each section, keep your readers in mind, ensuring that your passion and dedication shine through every page.

Thesis examples

To further elucidate the concept of a thesis, here are illustrative examples from various fields:

Example 1 (History): Abolition, Africans, and Abstraction: the Influence of the ‘Noble Savage’ on British and French Antislavery Thought, 1787-1807 by Suchait Kahlon.

Example 2 (Climate Dynamics): Influence of external forcings on abrupt millennial-scale climate changes: a statistical modelling study by Takahito Mitsui · Michel Crucifix

Checklist for your thesis evaluation

Evaluating your thesis ensures that your research meets the standards of academia. Here's an elaborate checklist to guide you through this critical process.

Content and structure

• Is the thesis statement clear, concise, and debatable?
• Does the introduction provide sufficient background and context?
• Is the literature review comprehensive, relevant, and well-organized?
• Does the methodology section clearly describe and justify the research methods?
• Are the results/findings presented clearly and logically?
• Does the discussion interpret the results in light of the research question and existing literature?
• Is the conclusion summarizing the research and suggesting future directions or implications?

Clarity and coherence

• Is the writing clear and free of jargon?
• Are ideas and sections logically connected and flowing?
• Is there a clear narrative or argument throughout the thesis?

Research quality

• Is the research question significant and relevant?
• Are the research methods appropriate for the question?
• Is the sample size (if applicable) adequate?
• Are the data analysis techniques appropriate and correctly applied?
• Are potential biases or limitations addressed?

Originality and significance

• Does the thesis contribute new knowledge or insights to the field?
• Is the research grounded in existing literature while offering fresh perspectives?

Formatting and presentation

• Is the thesis formatted according to institutional guidelines?
• Are figures, tables, and charts clear, labeled, and referenced in the text?
• Is the bibliography or reference list complete and consistently formatted?
• Are appendices relevant and appropriately referenced in the main text?

Grammar and language

• Is the thesis free of grammatical and spelling errors?
• Is the language professional, consistent, and appropriate for an academic audience?
• Are quotations and paraphrased material correctly cited?

Feedback and revision

• Have you sought feedback from peers, advisors, or experts in the field?
• Have you addressed the feedback and made the necessary revisions?

Overall assessment

• Does the thesis as a whole feel cohesive and comprehensive?
• Would the thesis be understandable and valuable to someone in your field?

Ensure to use this checklist to leave no ground for doubt or missed information in your thesis.

After writing your thesis, the next step is to discuss and defend your findings verbally in front of a knowledgeable panel. You’ve to be well prepared as your professors may grade your presentation abilities.

Preparing your thesis defense

A thesis defense, also known as "defending the thesis," is the culmination of a scholar's research journey. It's the final frontier, where you’ll present their findings and face scrutiny from a panel of experts.

Typically, the defense involves a public presentation where you’ll have to outline your study, followed by a question-and-answer session with a committee of experts. This committee assesses the validity, originality, and significance of the research.

The defense serves as a rite of passage for scholars. It's an opportunity to showcase expertise, address criticisms, and refine arguments. A successful defense not only validates the research but also establishes your authority as a researcher in your field.

Here’s how you can effectively prepare for your thesis defense .

Now, having touched upon the process of defending a thesis, it's worth noting that scholarly work can take various forms, depending on academic and regional practices.

One such form, often paralleled with the thesis, is the 'dissertation.' But what differentiates the two?

Dissertation vs. Thesis

Often used interchangeably in casual discourse, they refer to distinct research projects undertaken at different levels of higher education.

To the uninitiated, understanding their meaning might be elusive. So, let's demystify these terms and delve into their core differences.

Here's a table differentiating between the two.

Wrapping up

From understanding the foundational concept of a thesis to navigating its various components, differentiating it from a dissertation, and recognizing the importance of proper citation — this guide covers it all.

As scholars and readers, understanding these nuances not only aids in academic pursuits but also fosters a deeper appreciation for the relentless quest for knowledge that drives academia.

It’s important to remember that every thesis is a testament to curiosity, dedication, and the indomitable spirit of discovery.

Good luck with your thesis writing!

Frequently Asked Questions

A thesis typically ranges between 40-80 pages, but its length can vary based on the research topic, institution guidelines, and level of study.

A PhD thesis usually spans 200-300 pages, though this can vary based on the discipline, complexity of the research, and institutional requirements.

To identify a thesis topic, consider current trends in your field, gaps in existing literature, personal interests, and discussions with advisors or mentors. Additionally, reviewing related journals and conference proceedings can provide insights into potential areas of exploration.

The conceptual framework is often situated in the literature review or theoretical framework section of a thesis. It helps set the stage by providing the context, defining key concepts, and explaining the relationships between variables.

A thesis statement should be concise, clear, and specific. It should state the main argument or point of your research. Start by pinpointing the central question or issue your research addresses, then condense that into a single statement, ensuring it reflects the essence of your paper.

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Citation analysis of Ph.D. theses with data from Scopus and Google Books

• Open access
• Published: 24 October 2021
• Volume 126 , pages 9431–9456, ( 2021 )

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• Paul Donner   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5737-8483 1  

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This study investigates the potential of citation analysis of Ph.D. theses to obtain valid and useful early career performance indicators at the level of university departments. For German theses from 1996 to 2018 the suitability of citation data from Scopus and Google Books is studied and found to be sufficient to obtain quantitative estimates of early career researchers’ performance at departmental level in terms of scientific recognition and use of their dissertations as reflected in citations. Scopus and Google Books citations complement each other and have little overlap. Individual theses’ citation counts are much higher for those awarded a dissertation award than others. Departmental level estimates of citation impact agree reasonably well with panel committee peer review ratings of early career researcher support.

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Introduction

In this article we present a study on the feasibility of Ph.D. thesis citation analysis and its potential for studies of early career researchers (ECR) and for the rigorous evaluation of university departments. The context is the German national research system with its characteristics of a very high ratio of graduating Ph.D.’s to available open job positions in academia, a distinct national language publication tradition in the social sciences and humanities and slowly unfolding change from a traditional apprenticeship-type Ph.D. system to a grad school type system. The first nationwide census in Germany reported 152,300 registered active doctoral students in Germany (Vollmar 2019 ). In the same year, 28,404 doctoral students passed their exams in Germany (Statitisches Bundesamt 2018 ). Both universities and science and higher education policy attach high value to doctoral training and consider it a core task of the university system. For this reason, doctoral student performance also plays an important role in institutional assessment systems.

While there is currently no national scale research assessment implemented in Germany, all German federal states have introduced formula-based partial funding allocation systems for universities. In most of these, the number of Ph.D. candidates is a well-established indicator. Most universities also partially distribute funds internally by similar systems. Such implementations can be seen as incomplete as they do not take into account the actual research output of Ph.D. candidates. In this contribution we investigate if citation analysis of doctoral theses is feasible on a large scale and can conceptually and practically serve as a complement to current operationalizations of ECR performance. For this purpose we study the utility of two citation data sources, Scopus and Google Books. We analyze the obtained citation data at the level of university departments within disciplines.

Doctoral studies

The doctoral studies phase can theoretically be conceived as a status transition period. It comprises a status passage process from apprentice to formally acknowledged researcher and colleague in the social context of a scientific community (Laudel and Gläser 2008 ). Footnote 1 The published doctoral thesis and its public defense are manifest proof of the fulfilment of the degree criterion of independent scientific contribution, marking said transition. The scientific community, rather than the specific organization, collectively sets the goals and standards of work in the profession, and experienced members of a community of peers judge and grade the doctoral work upon completion. Footnote 2 Yet the specific organization also plays a very important role. The Ph.D. project and dissertation are closely associated with the hosting university as it is this organization that provides the environmental means to conduct the Ph.D. research, as a bare minimum the supervision by professors and experienced researchers, but often also formal employment with salary, workspace and facilities. And it is also the department ( Fakultät ) which formally confers the degree after passing the thesis review and defense.

As a rule, it is a formal requirement of doctoral studies that the Ph.D. candidates make substantial independent scientific contributions and publish the results. The Ph.D. thesis is a published scientific work and can be read and cited by other researchers. The extent to which other researchers make use of these results is reflected in citations to the work and is in principle amenable to bibliometric citation analysis (Kousha and Thelwall 2019 ). Citation impact of theses can be seen as a proxy of the recognition of the utility and relevance of the doctoral research results by other researchers. Theses are often not published in an established venue and are hence absent from the usual channels of communication of the research front, more so in journal-oriented fields, whereas in book-oriented fields, publication of theses through scholarly publishers is common. We address this challenge by investigating the presence of dissertation citations in data sources hitherto not sufficiently considered for this purpose in what follows.

Research contribution of early career researchers and performance evaluation in Germany

Almost all universities in Germany are predominantly tax-funded and the consumption of these public resources necessitates a certain degree of transparency to establish and maintain the perceived legitimacy of the higher education and research system. Consequently, universities and their subdivisions are increasingly subjected to evaluations. The pressure to participate in evaluation exercises, or in some cases the bureaucratic directive to do so by the responsible political actors, in turn, derives from demands of the public, which holds political actors accountable for the responsible spending of resources appropriated from net tax payers. Because the training of Ph.D. candidates is undisputedly a core task of universities, it is commonly implemented as an important component or dimension in university research evaluation.

While there is no official established national-scale research evaluation exercise in Germany (Hinze et al. 2019 ), the assessment of ECR performance plays a very importent role in evaluation and funding of universities and in the systems of performance-based funding within universities. In the following paragraphs we will shows this with several examples while critically discussing some inadequacies of the extant operationalizations of the ECR performance dimensions, thereby substantiating the case for more research into the affordance of Ph.D. thesis citation analysis.

The Council of Science and Humanities ( Wissenschaftsrat ) has conducted four pilot studies for national-scale evaluations of disciplines in universities and research institutes ( Forschungsrating ). While the exercises were utilized to test different modalities Footnote 3 , they all followed a basic template of informed peer review by appointed expert committees along a number of prescribed performance dimensions. The evaluation results did not have any serious funding allocation or restructuring consequences for the units. In all exercises, the dimension of support for early career researchers played a prominent role next to such dimensions as research quality, impact/effectivity, efficiency, and transfer of knowledge into society. Footnote 4 In all four exercises, the dimension was operationalized with a combination of quantitative and qualitative criteria.

As the designation ‘support for early career researchers’ suggests, the focus was primarily on the support structures and provisions that the assessed units offered, but the outcomes or successes of these support environments also played a role. Yet, some of the applied indicators are more in line with a construct such as the performance, or success, of the ECRs themselves, namely, first appointments of graduates to professorships, scholarships or fellowship of ECRs (if granted externally of the assessed unit), and awards. Footnote 5 As for the difference between the concept of the efforts expended for ECRs and the concept of the performance of ECRs, it appears to be implied that the efforts cause the performance, but this is far from self-evident. There may well be extensive support programs without realized benefits or ECRs achieving great success despite a lack of support structures. For this implied causal connection to be accepted, its mechanism should first be worked out and articulated and then be empirically validated, which was not the case in the Forschungsrating evaluation exercises. Footnote 6

No bibliometric data on Ph.D. theses was employed in the Forschungsrating exercises (Wissenschaftsrat 2007 , 2008 , 2011 , 2012 ). However, it stands to reason that citation analysis of theses might provide a valuable complementary tool if a more sound operationalization of the dimension of the performance of ECRs is to be established in similar future assessments. As for the publications of ECRs besides doctoral theses, these have been included in the other dimensions in which publications were used as criteria without special consideration. Footnote 7

There is a further area of university evaluation in which a performance indicator of ECRs, namely the absolute number of Ph.D. graduates over a specific time period, is an important component. At the time of writing, systems of partial funding allocation from ministries to states’ universities across all German federal states are well established. In these systems, universities within a state compete with one another for a modest part of the total budget based on fixed formulas relating performance to money. The performance based funding systems, different for each state, all include ‘research’ among their dimensions, and within it, the number of graduated Ph.D.’s is the second most important indicator after the acquired third party funding of universities (Wespel and Jaeger 2015 ). In direct consequence, similar systems have also found widespread application to distribute funds across departments within universities (Jaeger 2006 ; Niggemann 2020 ). These systems differ across universities. If only the number of completed Ph.D.’s is used as an indicator, then the quality of the research of the graduates does not matter in such systems. It is conceivable that graduating as many Ph.D.’s as possible becomes prioritized at the expense of the quality of ECR research and training.

A working group tasked by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research to work out an indicator model for monitoring the situation of early career researchers in Germany proposed to consider the citation impact of publications as an indicator of outcomes (Projektgruppe Indikatorenmodell 2014 ). Under the heading of “quality of Ph.D.—disciplinary acceptance and possibility of transfer” the authors acknowledge that, in principle, citation analysis of Ph.D. theses is possible, but citation counts do not directly measure scientific quality, but rather the level of response to, and reuse of, publications (impact). Moreover, it is stated that the literature of the social sciences and humanities are not covered well in citation indexes and theses are generally not indexed as primary documents (p. 136). Nevertheless, this approach is not to be rejected out of hand. Rather, it is recommended that the prospects of thesis citation analysis be empirically studied to judge its suitability (p. 137).

Another motivation for the present study was the finding of the National Report on Junior Scholars that even though “[j]unior scholars make a telling contribution to developing scientific and social insights and to innovation” (p. 3) the “contribution made by junior scholars to research and knowledge sharing is difficult to quantify in view of the available data” (Consortium for the National Report on Junior Scholars 2017 , p. 19).

To sum up, the foregoing discussion establishes (1) that there is a theoretically underdeveloped evaluation practice in the area of ECR support and performance, and (2) that a need for better early career researcher performance indicators on the institutional level has been suggested to science policy actors. This gives occasion to explore which, if any, contribution bibliometrics can make to a valid and practically useful assessment.

Prior research

Citation analysis of dissertation theses.

There are few publications on citation analysis of Ph.D. theses as the cited documents, as opposed to studies of the documents cited in theses, of which there are plenty. Yoels ( 1974 ) studied citations to dissertations in American journals in optics, political science (one journal each), and sociology (two journals) from the 1955 to 1969 volumes. In each case, several hundred citations in total to all Ph.D. theses combined were found, with a notable concentration on origins of Ph.D.’s in departments of high prestige – a possible first hint of differential research performance reflected in Ph.D. thesis citations. Non-US dissertations were cited only in optics. Author self-citations were very common, especially in optics and political science. While citations peaked in the periods of 1–2 or 3–5 years after the Ph.D. was awarded, they continued to be cited to some degree as much as 10 years later. According to Larivière et al. ( 2008 ), dissertations only account for a very small fraction of cited references in the Web of Science database. The impact of individual theses was not investigated. This study used a search approach in the cited references, based on keywords for theses and filtering, which may not be able to discover all dissertation citations. Kousha and Thelwall ( 2019 ) investigated Google Scholar citation counts and Mendeley reader counts for a large set of American dissertations from 2013 to 2017 sourced from ProQuest. This study did not take into account Google Books. Of these dissertations, 20% had one or more citations (2013: over 30%, 2017: over 5%) while 16% had at least one Mendeley reader. Average citation counts were comparatively high in the arts, social sciences, and humanities, and low in science, technology, and biomedical subjects. The authors evaluated the citation data quality and found that 97% of the citations of a sample of 646 were correct. As for the publication type of the citing documents, the majority were journal articles (56%), remarkably many were other dissertations (29%), and only 6% of citations originated from books. This suggests that Google Books might be a relevant citation data source instead of, or in addition to, Google Scholar.

More research has been conducted into the citation impact of thesis-related journal publications. Hay ( 1985 ) found that for the special case of a small sample from UK human geography research, papers based on Ph.D. thesis work accrued more citations than papers by established researchers. In a recent study of refereed journal publications based on US psychology Ph.D. theses, Evans et al. ( 2018 ) found that they were cited on average 16 times after 10 years. The citation impact of journal articles to which Ph.D. candidates contributed (but not of dissertations) has only been studied on a large scale for the Canadian province of Quèbec (Larivière 2012 ). The impact of journal papers with Ph.D. candidates’ contribution was contrasted to all other papers with Quèbec authors in the Web of Science database. As the impact of these papers, quantified as average of relative citations, was close to that of the comparison groups in three of four broad subject areas, it can be tentatively assumed that the impact of doctoral candidates’ papers was on par with that of their more experienced colleagues. The area with a notable difference between groups was arts and humanities, in which the coverage of publication output in the database was less comprehensive because a lot of research is published in monographs, and in which presumably many papers were written in French, another reason for lower coverage.

While these papers are not concerned with citations to dissertations, they do suggest that the research of Ph.D.’s is as impactful as that of other colleagues. To the best of our knowledge, no large scale study has been conducted on the citation impact of German theses on the level of individual works or on the level of university departments. We so far have scant information on the citation impact of dissertation theses, therefore the current study aims to fill this gap by a large scale investigation of citations received by German Ph.D. theses in Scopus and Google Books.

Causes for department-level performance differences

As we wish to investigate performance differences between departments of universities by discipline as reflected by thesis citations, we next consider the literature on plausible reasons for such performance differences which can result in differences in thesis citation impact. We do not consider individual level reasons for performance differences such as ability, intrinsic motivation, perseverance, and commitment.

One possible reason for cross-department performance differences is mutual selectivity of Ph.D. project applicants and Ph.D. project supervisors. In a situation in which there is some choice between the departments at which prospective Ph.D. candidates might register and some choice between the applicants a prospective supervisor might accept, out of self-interest both sides will seek to optimize their outcomes given their particular constraints. That is, applicants will opt for the most promising department for their future career while supervisors or selection committees, and thus departments, will attempt to select the most promising candidates, perhaps those who they judge most likely to contribute positively to their research agenda. Both sides can take into account a variety of criteria, such as departmental reputation or candidates’ prior performance. This is part of the normal, constant social process of mutual evaluation in science. However, in this case, the mutual evaluation does not take place between peers, that is, individuals of equal scientific social status. Rather, the situation is characterized by status inequality (superior-inferior, i.e. professor-applicant). Consequently, an applicant may well apply to her or his preferred department and supervisor, but the supervisor or the selection committee makes the acceptance decision. In practice however, there are many constraints on such situations. For example, as described above, the current evaluation regime rewards the sheer quantity of completed Ph.D.’s.

Once the choices are made, Ph.D. candidates at different departments can face quite different environments, more or less conducive to research performance (which, as far as they were aware of them and were able to judge them, they would have taken into consideration, as mentioned). For instance, some departments might have access to important equipment and resources, others not. There may prevail different local practices in time available for the Ph.D. project for employed candidates as opposed to expected participation in groups’ research, teaching, and other duties (Hesli and Lee 2011 ).

Ph.D. candidates may benefit from the support, experience and stimulation of the presence of highly accomplished supervisors. Experienced and engaged supervisors teach explicit and tacit knowledge and can serve as role models. Long and McGinnis ( 1985 ) found that the performance of mentors was associated with Ph.D.’s publication and citation counts. In particular, citations were predicted by collaborating with the mentor and the mentor’s own prior citation counts. Mentors’ eminence only had a weak positive effect on the publication output of Ph.D.’s who actively collaborated with them. Similarly, Hilmer and Hilmer ( 2007 ) report that advisors’ publication productivity is associated with candidate’s publication count. However, there are multiple professors or other supervisors at any department, which causes variation within departments if the department and not the supervisor is used as a predictive variable. Between departments it is then the concentration of highly accomplished supervisors that may cause differences. Beyond immediate supervisors, a more or less supportive research environment can offer opportunities for learning, cooperation or access to personal networks. For example, Kim and Karau ( 2009 ) found that support from faculty, through the development of research skills, lead to higher publication productivity of management Ph.D. candidates. Local work culture and local expectations of performance may elicit behavioral adjustment (Allison and Long 1990 ).

In summary, prior research shows that there are several reasons to expect department-level differences of Ph.D. research quality (and its reproduction and reinforcement) which might be reflected in thesis citation impact. But it needs to be noted that the present study cannot serve towards shedding light on which particular factors are associated with Ph.D. performance in terms of citation impact. It is limited to testing if there are any department-level differences on this measure.

Citation counts and scientific impact of dissertation theses

We have argued above that citation analysis of theses could be a complementary tool for quantitative assessment of university departments in terms of the research performance of early career researchers. Hence it needs to be established that citation counts of dissertations are in fact associated with a conception of the impact of research.

As outlined by Hemlin ( 1996 ), “[t]he idea [of citation analysis] is that the more cited an author or a paper is by others, the more attention it has received. This attention is interpreted as an indicator of the importance, the visibility, or the impact of the researcher or the paper in the scientific community. Whether citation measures also express research quality is a highly debated issue.” Hemlin reviewed a number of studies of the relationship between citations and research quality but was not able to make a definite conclusion: “it is possible that citation analysis is an indicator of scientific recognition, usefulness and, to some unknown extent, quality.” Researchers cite for a variety of reasons, not only or primarily to indicate the quality of the cited work (Aksnes et al. 2019 ; Bornmann and Daniel 2008 ). Nevertheless, work that is cited usually has some importance for the citing work. Even citations classified in citation behavior studies as ‘perfunctory’ or ‘persuasive’ are not made randomly. On the contrary, for a citation to persuade anyone, the content of the cited work needs to be convincing rather than ephemeral, irrelevant, or immaterial. Citation counts are thus a direct measure of the utility, influence, and importance of publications for further research (Martin and Irvine 1983 , sec. 6). Therefore, as a measure of scientific impact, citation counts have face validity. They are a measure of the concept itself, though a noisy one. Not so for research quality.

Highly relevant for the topic of the present study are the early citation impact validation studies by Nederhof and van Raan ( 1987 ), Nederhof and van Raan ( 1989 ). These studied the differences in citation impact of publications produced during doctoral studies of physics and chemistry Ph.D. holders, comparing those awarded the distinction ‘cum laude’ for their dissertation based on the quality of the research with other graduates without this distinction (cum laude: 12% of n = 237 in chemistry, 13% of n = 138 in physics). In physics, “[c]ompared to non-cumlaudes, cumlaudes received more than twice as many citations overall for their publications, which were all given by scientists outside their alma mater” (Nederhof and van Raan 1987 , p. 346). In fact, differences in citation impact of papers between the groups are already apparent before graduation, that is, before the conferral of the cum laude distinction on the basis of the dissertation. And interestingly, “[a]fter graduation, citation rates of cumlaudes even decline to the level of non-cumlaudes” (p. 347) leading the authors to suggest that “the quality of the research project, and not the quality of the particular graduate is the most important determinant of both productivity and impact figures. A possible scenario would be that some PhD graduates are choosen carefully by their mentors to do research in one of the usually rare very promising, interesting and hot research topics currently available. Most others are engaged in relatively less interesting and promising graduate research projects” (p. 348). The results in chemistry are very similar: “Large difference in impact and productivity favor cumlaudes three to 2 years before graduation, differences which decrease in the following years, although remaining significant. [...] Various sceptics have claimed that bibliometric measures based on citations are generally invalid. The present data do not offer any support for this stance. Highly significant differences in impact and productivity were obtained between two groups distinguished on a measure of scientific quality based on peer review (the cum laude award)” (Nederhof and van Raan 1989 , p. 434).

In Germany, a system of four passing marks and one failing mark is commonly used. The better the referees judge the thesis, the higher the mark. Studies investigating the association of level of mark and citation impact of theses or thesis-associated publications are as of yet lacking. The closest are studies on medical doctoral theses from Charité. Oestmann et al. ( 2015 ) provide a correlational study of medical doctoral degree marks (averages of thesis and oral exams marks) and the publications associated with the theses from one institution, Charité University Medicine Berlin. Their data for 1992–2014 shows a longitudinal decrease of the incidence of the third best mark and an increase of the second best mark. For samples from 3 years (1998, 2004, 2008) for which publication data were collected, an association between the level of the mark and the publication productivity was detected. Both the chance to publish any peer-reviewed articles and the number of articles increase with the level of the mark. The study was extended in Chuadja ( 2021 ) with publication data for 2015 graduates. It was found that the time to graduation covaries with the level of the mark. For 2015 graduates, the average 5 year Journal Impact Factors for thesis-associated publication increase with the level of the graduation mark in the sense that theses awarded better marks produced publications in journals with higher Impact Factors. As little as these findings say about the real association of thesis research quality and citation impact, they suggest enough to motivate more research into this relationship.

Research questions

The following research questions will be addressed:

How often are individual Ph.D. theses cited in the journal and book literature?

Does Google Books contain sufficient additional citation data to warrant its inclusion as an additional data source alongside established data sources?

Can differences between universities within a discipline explain some of the variability in citation counts?

Are there noteworthy differences in Ph.D. thesis citation impact on the institutional level within disciplines?

Are the citation counts of Ph.D. theses associated with their scientific quality?

To test whether or not dissertation citation impact is a suitable indicator of departmental Ph.D. performance, citation data for theses needs to be collected, aggregated and studied for associations with other relevant indicators, such as doctorate conferrals, drop-out rates, graduate employability, thesis awards, or subjective program appraisals of graduates. As a first step towards a better understanding of Ph.D. performance, we conducted a study on citation sources for dissertations. The present study is restricted to monograph form dissertations. These also include monographs that are based on material published as articles. However, to be able to assess the complete scientific impact of a Ph.D. project it is necessary to also include the impact of papers which are produced in the context of the Ph.D. project, for both cumulative publication-based theses and for theses only published in monograph form. Because of this, the later results should be interpreted with due caution as we do not claim completeness of data.

Dissertations’ bibliographical data

There is presently no central integrated source for data on dissertations from Germany. The best available source is the catalog of the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB). The DNB has a mandate to collect all publications originating from Germany, including Ph.D. theses. This source of dissertation data has been found useful for science studies research previously (Heinisch and Buenstorf 2018 ; Heinisch et al. 2020 ). We downloaded records for all Ph.D. dissertations from the German National Library online catalog in April 2019 using a search restriction in the university publications field of “diss*”, as recommended by the catalog usage instructions, and publication year range 1996–2018. Records were downloaded by subject fields in the CSV format option. Footnote 8 In this first step 534,925 records were obtained. In a second step, the author name and work title field were cleaned and the university information extracted and normalized and non-German university records excluded. We also excluded records assigned to medicine as a first subject class which were downloaded because they were assigned to other classes as well. As the dataset often contained more than one version of a particular thesis because different formats and editions were cataloged, these were carefully de-duplicated. In this process, as far as possible the records containing the most complete data and describing the temporally earliest version were retained as the primary records. Variant records were also kept in order to later be able to collect citations to all variants. This reduced the dataset to a size of 361,971 records. Of these, about 16% did not contain information on the degree-granting university. As the National Library’s subject classification system was changed during the covered period (in 2004), the class designations were unified based on the Library’s mapping and aggregated into a simplified 40-class system. Footnote 9 If more than one subject class was assigned, only the first was retained.

Citation data

Citation data from periodicals was obtained from a snapshot of Scopus data from May 2018. Scopus was chosen over Web of Science as a source of citation data because full cited titles for items not contained as primary documents in Web of Science have only recently been indexed. Before this change, titles were abbreviated so inconsistently and to such short strings as to be unusable, while this data is always available in unchanged form in Scopus if it is available in the original reference. Cited references data was restricted to non-source citations, that is, references not matched with Scopus-indexed records. Dissertation bibliographical information (author name, publication year and title) for primary and secondary records was compared to reference data. If the author family name and given name first initial matched exactly and the cited publication year was within ± 1 year of the dissertation publication year, then the title information was further compared as follows. The dissertation’s title was compared to both Scopus cited reference title and cited source title, as we found these two data fields were both used for the cited thesis title. Before comparison, both titles were truncated to the character length of the shorter title. If the edit distance similarity between titles was greater than 75 out of 100, the citation was accepted as valid and stored. We furthermore considered the case that theses might occasionally be indexed as Scopus source publications. We used the same matching approach as outlined above to obtain matching Scopus records restricted to book publication types. This resulted in 659 matched theses. In addition, matching by ISBN to Scopus source publications resulted in 229 matched theses of which 50 were not matched in the preceding step. The citations to these matched source publications were added to the reference matched citations after removing duplicates. Citations were summed across all variant records while filtering out duplicate citations.

In addition, we investigated the utility of Google Books as a citation data source. This is motivated by the fact that many Ph.D. theses are published in the German language and in disciplines favoring publication in books over journal articles. Citation search in Google Books has been made accessible to researchers by the Webometric Analyst tool, which allows for largely automated querying with given input data (Kousha and Thelwall 2015 ). We used Webometric Analyst version 2.0 in April and May 2019 to obtain citation data for all Ph.D. thesis records. We only used primary records, not variants, as the collection process takes quite a long time. Search was done with the software’s standard settings using author family name, publication year and six title words and subsequent result filtering was employed with matching individual title words rather than exact full match. We additionally removed citations from a number of national and disciplinary bibliographies and annual reports because these are not research publications but lists of all publications in a discipline or produced by a certain research unit. We also removed Google Books citations from sources that were indexed in Scopus (10,958 citations) as these would otherwise be duplicates.

Google Scholar was not used as a citation data source, because it includes a lot of grey literature and there is no possibility to restrict citation counts to citations from journal and book literature. It has alarming rates of incorrect citations (García-Pérez 2010 , p. 2075), however Kousha & Thelwall (2015, p. 479) found the citation error rate for Ph.D. theses in Google Scholar to be quite low.

Dissertation award data

For later validation purposes we collected data on German dissertation awards from the web. We considered awards for specific disciplines granted in a competitive manner based on research quality by scholarly societies, foundations and companies. A web search was conducted for awards, either specifically for dissertations or for contributions by early career researchers which mention dissertations besides other works. Only awards granted by committees of discipline experts and awarded by Germany-based societies etc. were considered, we did not include internationally oriented awards. In general, these awards are given on the basis of scientific quality and only works published in the preceding one or 2 years are accepted for submission. We were able to identify 946 Ph.D. theses that received one or more dissertation awards from a total of 122 different awards. More details can be found in the “Appendix”, Table 5 .

A typical example is the Wilhelm Pfeffer Prize of the German Botanical Society, which is described as follows: “The Wilhelm Pfeffer Prize is awarded by the DBG’s Wilhelm Pfeffer Foundation for an outstanding PhD thesis (dissertation) in the field of plant sciences and scientific botany.” Footnote 10 The winning thesis is selected by the board of the Foundation. If no work achieves the scientific excellence expected by the board, no prize is awarded. Footnote 11

Citation data for Ph.D. theses

In total we were able to obtain 329,236 Scopus citations and 476,495 Google Books citations for the 361,971 Ph.D. thesis records. There was an overlap of about 11,000 citations from journals indexed in both sources, which was removed from the Google Books data. The large majority of Scopus citations was found with the primary thesis records only (95%). Secondary (variant) thesis records and thesis records matched as Scopus source document records contributed 5% of the Scopus citations. Scopus and Google Books citation counts are modestly correlated with Pearson’s r = 0.20 ( \(p < 0.01\) , 95% CI 0.197–0.203). Table 1 gives an overview of the numbers of citations for theses published in different years. Footnote 12 One can observe a minor overall growth in annual dissertations and modest peak in citations in the early years of the observation period. Overall, and consistently for all thesis publication years, theses are cited more often in Google Books than in Scopus by a ratio of about 3 to 2. Hence, in general, German Ph.D. theses were cited more often in the book literature covered by Google Books than in the periodical literature covered by Scopus. The average number of citations per thesis seems to stabilize at around 3.5, as the values for 1996–2003 are all of that magnitude. As citations were collected in 2019, these works needed about 15 years to reach a level at which they did not increase further. Whereas Kousha and Thelwall ( 2019 ) found that 20% of the American dissertations from the period 2013–2017 were cited at least once in Google Scholar, the corresponding figure from our data set is 30% for the combined figure of both citation data sources.

We studied author self-citations of dissertations, both by comparing the thesis author to all publication authors of a citing paper (all-authors self-citations) and only to the first author. We used exact match or Jaro-Winkler similarity greater than 90 out of 100 for author name comparison (Donner 2016 ). Considering only the first authors of publications is more lenient in that it does not punish an author for self-citation that could possibly be suggested by co-authors and is at least endorsed by them (Glänzel and Thijs 2004 ). For the Google Books citation corpus we find only 8366 all-authors self-citations (1.7%) and 5711 first author self-citations (1.2%). Footnote 13 In the Scopus citations there are 52,032 all-author self-citations (15.6%) and 31,260 first-author self-citations (9.4%). Overall this amounts to an all-author self-citation rate of 7.5% and a first-author self-citation rate of 4.6%, quite lower rates than Yoels ( 1974 ). We do not exclude any self-citations in the following analyses.

Figure  1 displays the citation count distribution for theses published before 2004, in which citation counts are likely to not increase any further. In this subset, 58% of dissertations have one or more citations. Ph.D. theses exhibit the typical highly skewed and long-tailed citation count distribution.

Citation count distribution for German Ph.D. theses from 1997–2003 (values greater than 10 citations not shown), n = 118,447

The distributions of theses and citations by data source over subject classes are displayed in Table 2 . There are striking differences in the origin of the major part of citations across disciplines. Social sciences and humanities such as education, economics, German language and literature, history, and especially law are cited much more often in Google Books. The opposite holds in natural science subjects like biology or physics, and in computer science and mathematics, where most citations come from Scopus. This table also indicates that the overall most highly cited dissertations can be found in the humanities (history, archeology and prehistory, religion) and that natural science dissertations are poorly cited (biology, physics and astronomy, chemistry). Much of this difference is probably because in the latter subjects, Ph.D. project results are almost always communicated in journal articles first and citing a dissertation is rarely necessary.

Validation of citation count data with award data

In order to judge whether thesis citation counts can be considered to include a valid signal of scientific quality (research question 5) we studied the citation impact of theses that received dissertation awards compared to those which did not. High citation counts, however, can not simply be equated with high scientific quality. As a rule, the awards for which we collected data are conferred by committees of subject experts explicitly on the basis of scientific quality and importance. But if the content of theses has been published in journal articles before it was published in a thesis it is possible that awards juries might have been influenced by citation counts of these articles.

Comparing the 946 dissertations that were identified as having received a scientific award directly with the non-awarded dissertations we find that the former received on average 3.9 citations while the latter received on average 2.2 citations. To factor out possible differences across subjects and time we match each award-winning thesis with all non-awarded theses of the same subject and year, and calculate the average citation count of this comparable publication set. Award theses obtain 3.9 citations and matched non-award theses 1.7 citations. This shows that Ph.D. theses that receive awards on average are cited more often than comparable theses and indicates that citation counts partially indicate scientific quality as sought out by award committees. Nevertheless, not every award-winning thesis need be highly cited nor every highly cited thesis be of high research quality and awarded a prize. The differences reported here hold on average for large numbers of observations, but do not imply a strong association between scientific quality and citation count on the level of individual dissertations. This is important to note lest the false conclusion be drawn that merely because a thesis is not cited or rarely cited, it is of low quality. Such a view must be emphatically rejected as it is not supported by the data.

A possible objection to the use of award data for validating the relationship of citation counts and the importance and quality of research is that it might be the signal of the award itself which makes the publications more visible to potential citers. In other words, a thesis is highlighted and brought to the attention of researchers by getting an award and high citation counts are a result not of the intrinsic merit of the reported research but merely of the raised visibility. The study by Diekmann et al. ( 2012 ) has scrutinized this hypothesis. They studied citation counts (Social Sciences Citation Index) of 102 papers awarded the Thyssen award for German social science journal papers and a random control sample of other publications from the same journals. The award winners are determined by a jury of experts and there are first, second, and third rank awards each year. It was found that awarded papers were cited on average six times after 10 years, control articles two times. Moreover, first rank award articles were cited 9 times, second rank articles 6 times, and third rank articles 4 times on average. The jury decides in the year after the publication of the articles. The authors argue that publications citing awarded articles in the first year after its publication can not possibly have been influenced by the award. For citation counts of a 1-year citation window, awarded articles are cited 0.8 times, control group articles 0.2 times on average. And again, the ranks of the awards correspond to different citation levels. Thus it is evident that the citation reception of the articles are different even before the awards have been decided. Citing researchers and expert committee independently agree on the importance of these articles.

We can replicate this test with our data by restricting the citations to those received in the year of publication of the thesis and the next year. This results in average citation counts of 0.040 for theses which received awards and 0.012 for theses which did not receive any award. Award-winning Ph.D. theses are cited more than three times as often as other theses even before the awards have been granted and before any possible publicity had enough time to manifest itself in increased citation counts.

Application: a preliminary study of citation impact differences between departments

In this section we consider research questions 3 and 4, which are concerned with the existence of differences in Ph.D. thesis citation impact between universities in the same discipline and their magnitude. This application is preliminary because only the citation impact of the thesis but not of the thesis-related publications is considered here and because we use a subject classification based on that of the National Library. Footnote 14 In order to mitigate against these limitations as much as possible, we study here only two subjects from the humanities (English and American language and literature, henceforth EALL) and the social sciences (sociology) which are characterized by Ph.D. theses mainly published as monographs rather than as articles and thus show relatively high dissertation citation counts. These are also disciplines specifically identifiable in the classification system and as distinct university departments. We furthermore restrict the thesis publication years to the years covered by the national scale pilot research assessment exercises discussed in the introduction section which were carried out by the German Council of Science and Humanities in these two disciplines (Wissenschaftsrat 2008 , 2012 ) in order to be able to compare the results and to test if the number of observations in typical evaluation periods yield sufficient data for useful results.

We use multilevel Bayesian negative binomial regressions in which the observations (theses) are nested in the grouping factor universities, estimated with the R package brms , version 2.8.0 (Bürkner 2017 ). By using a multilevel model we can explicitly model the correlation of observations within a group, that is to say, take into account the characteristics of the departments which affect all Ph.D. candidates of a department and their research quality. The negative binomial response distribution is appropriate for the characteristic highly skewed, non-negative citation count distribution. The default prior distributions of brms were used. Model estimations are run with two MCMC chains with 2500 iterations each, of which the first 500 are for sampler warmup. As population level variables we include a thesis language dummy (German [reference category], English, Unknown/Other), the publication year, and dummies for whether the dissertation received an award (reference category: no award received). There were no awards identified for EALL in the observation period, so this variable only applies to the Sociology models. For the language variable we used the data from the National Library where available and supplemented it with automatically identified language of the dissertation title using R package cld3 , version 1.1. Languages other than English and German and theses with unidentifiable titles were coded as Unknown/Other.

Models are run for the two disciplines separately, once without including the university variable (null models) and once including it as a random intercept, making these multilevel models. If the multilevel model shows a better fit, i.e. can explain the data better, this would indicate significant variation between the different university departments in a discipline and higher similarity of citation impact of theses within a university than expected at random. In other words, the null model assumes independence of observations while the multilevel model controls for correlation of units within a group, here the citation counts of theses from a university. The results are presented in Table 3 . The coefficient of determination (row ‘R 2 ’) is calculated according to Nakagawa et al. ( 2017 ).

Regarding the population level variables, it can be seen that the publication year has a negative effect in EALL (younger theses received less citations, as expected) but no significant effect in Sociology. As the Sociology models data is from an earlier time period, this supports the notion that the citation counts used in the Sociology models have stabilized but those from EALL have not. According to the credible intervals, while there is no significant language effect on citations in the Sociology null model, controlling for the grouping structure reveals the language to be significant predictor. In EALL, English language theses received substantially more citations than German language theses. There is a strong positive effect in Sociology from having received an award for the Ph.D. thesis. If we compare the null models with their respective multilevel models, that is A to B and C to D, we can see that introducing the grouping structure does not affect the population level variable effects other than language for Sociology. In both disciplines, the group effect (standard deviation of the random intercept) is significantly above zero and the model fit in terms of R 2 improved, indicating that the hierarchical model is more appropriate and that the university department is a significant predictor. However, the values of the coefficients of determination are small, which suggests that it is not so much the included population level predictors and the group membership, but additional unobserved thesis-level characteristics that affect citation count. In addition, this means it is not possible to estimate with any accuracy a particular thesis’ citation impact only from knowing the department at which it originated. The estimated group effects describe the citation impact of particular university departments. The distribution of the estimates from models B and D with associated 95% credible intervals are displayed in Fig.  2 . It is evident that while there are substantial differences in the estimates as a whole, there is also large uncertainty about the exact magnitude about all effects, indicated by the wide credible intervals. This a consequence of the facts that, first, most departments produce theses across the range of citation impact and small differences in the ratios of high, middle and low impact theses determine the estimated group effects and, second, given the high within-group variability, there are likely too few observations in the applied time period to arrive at more precise estimates.

Ph.D. thesis citation impact regression group effect estimates for a 49 sociology departments (2001–2005) and b 52 English and American language and literature departments (2004–2010). Means and 95% posterior probability ranges

The results of the above mentioned research evaluation of sociology departments in the Forschungsrating series of national scale pilot assessments allow for a comparison between the university group effects of Ph.D. thesis citation impact obtained in the present study and qualitative ordinal ratings given by the expert committee in the category ‘support of early career researchers.’ Footnote 15 In the sociology assessment exercise, the ECR support dimension was explicitly intended to reflect both the supportive actions of the departments and their successes. The reviewer panel put special weight on the presence of structured degree programs and scholarships and obtained professorship positions of graduates. Further indicators that were taken into account were the number of conferred doctorates, the list of Ph.D. theses with publisher information, and a self-report of actions and successes. This dimension was rated by the committee on a five point scale ranging from 1, ‘not satisfactory’, to 5, ‘excellent’ (Wissenschaftsrat 2008 , p. 22).

For 47 universities both an estimated citation impact score (group effect coefficient from the above regression) and an ECR support rating were available for sociology in the same observation period. A tabulated comparison is presented in Table 4 . The Kendall \(\tau\) rank correlation between these two variables at the department level is 0.36 ( \(p < 0.01\) ), indicating a moderate association, but the mean citation scores in the table do not exhibit a clear pattern of increase with increasing expert-rated ECR support. The bulk of departments were rated in the lower middle and middle categories, that is to say, the ratings are highly concentrated in this range, making distinctions quite difficult.

ECR support expert committee rating and mean estimates of Ph.D. thesis citation impact of 47 German sociology departments (2001–2005)

This relationship is displayed in Fig.  3 . It can be seen that while the five rating groups do have some association with the citation analysis estimates, there is large variability within the groups, especially for categories 3 and 4. In fact, there is much overlap across all the rating groups in terms of citation impact scores. The university department with the highest citation impact effect estimate was rated as belonging to the middle groups of ECR support. In summary, the association between rated ECR support of a department and the impact of the department’s citation is demonstrable but moderate in size.

In this study we have demonstrated the utility of the combination of citation data from two distinct sources, Scopus and Google Books, for citation analysis of Ph.D. theses in the context of research evaluation of university departments. Our study has a number of limitations hampering its immediate implementation into practice. We did not have verified data about the theses produced by departments and used publication sets approximated by using a subject classification. We did not take into account the publications of Ph.D.’s other than the theses, such as journal articles, proceedings papers, and book chapters, which resulted in low citation counts in the sciences. These limitations must be resolved before any application for research evaluation and the present study is to be understood as a feasibility study only.

We now turn to the discussion of the results as they relate to the guiding research questions. The first research question concerned the typical citation counts of Ph.D. theses. We found that German Ph.D. theses were cited more often in the book literature covered by Google Books than in the periodical literature covered by Scopus and that it takes 10–15 years for citation counts to reach a stable level where they do not increase any further. At this stage, about 40% of theses remained uncited. We further found large differences in typical citation rates across fields. Theses are cited more often in the social sciences and humanities, especially in history and in archeology and prehistory. But citation rates were very low in physics and astronomy, chemistry and veterinary medicine. Furthermore, there were distinctive patterns of the origin of the bulk of citations between the two data sources, in line with the typical publication conventions of the sciences and the social sciences and humanities. Science theses received more citations from Scopus, that is, primarily the journal literature, than from the book literature covered by Google Books. The social sciences and humanities, on the other hand, obtained far more citations from the book literature covered in Google Books. Nevertheless, these fields’ theses do also receive substantial numbers of citations from the journal literature which must not be neglected. Thus with regard to our second research question we can state that Google Books is clearly a very useful citation data source for social sciences and humanities dissertations and most likely also for other publications beyond dissertations from these areas of research. Citations from Google Books are complementary to those from Scopus as they clearly cover a different literature; the two data sources have little overlap.

Our results of multilevel regressions allow us to affirm that there are clearly observable thesis citation impact differences between departments in a given discipline (research question 3). However, they are of small to moderate magnitude and the major part of citation count variation is found at the individual level (research question 4). Our results do not allow any statements about what factors caused these differences. They could be the result of mutual selection processes or of different levels of support or research capacity across departments. Our results of citation impact of departments, interpretable as collective performance of early career researchers at the university department level, are roughly in line with qualitative ratings of an expert committee in our case study of sociology. This association also does not rule out or confirm any possible explanations, as both department supportive actions and individual ECR successes were compounded in the rated dimension which furthermore showed only limited variation.

Research question 5 concerned the association of citation counts of Ph.D. theses and their research quality. Using information about dissertation awards we showed that theses which received such awards also received higher citation rates vis-à-vis comparable theses which did not win such awards. This result strongly suggests that if researchers cite Ph.D. theses, they do tend to prefer the higher quality ones, as recognized by award granting bodies and committees.

As a case in point for the status change approach we note that, in Germany, holding a Ph.D. degree is a requirement for applying for funding at the national public science funding body Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

While in other countries it is the norm that doctoral theses are evaluated by experts external to the university, this has traditionally not been the case in Germany (Wissenschaftsrat 2002 ). In fact, grading of the thesis by the Ph.D. supervisor is not considered inappropriate by the German Rectors’ Conference (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, 2012 , p. 7).

The assessed disciplines were chemistry, sociology, electrical and information engineering, and English and American language and literature. Possibly the most important experimentally varied factor was the criterion by which research outputs were accredited to units: either all outputs in the reference period by researchers employed at the unit at assessment time (“current potential” principle) or all outputs of the units' research staff in the period, regardless of employment at assessment time (“work-done-at” principle).

As an exception, the committee on the evaluation of English and American language and literature considered the support of ECRs as a sub-dimension of the ‘enabling of research’ dimension, alongside third-party funding activity and infrastructures, and networks. However, within this category, it was given special importance.

Other applied indicators are extra-scientific in that they are indicators of compliance to science-external political directions, such as the share of female doctoral candidates.

Another issue deserving more scrutiny are the incentive structures promoted by the indicators. Indicators such as the number of granted Ph.D.’s and number of current Ph.D. candidates, which were applied in all exercises, could further exacerbate the Ph.D. oversupply in academia (Rogge and Tesch 2016 ).

It would be justified to (also) include publications by ECR other than theses in an ECR performance dimension, ideally appropriately weighted for ECR’s co-authorship contribution (Donner 2020 ).

The field of medicine was not included, because medical theses (for a Dr. med. degree) typically have lower research requirements and are therefore generally not commensurable to theses in other subjects (Wissenschaftsrat 2004 , pp. 74–75). It was not possible to distinguish between Dr. med. theses and other degree theses within the medicine category, which means that regular natural science dissertations on medical subjects are not included in this dataset if medicine was the first assigned class.

Classification mapping according to https://wiki.dnb.de/download/attachments/141265749/ddcSachgruppenDNBKonkordanzNeuAlt.pdf accessed 07/18/2019. It should be noted that some classes were not used for some time, for example electrical engineering was not used between 2004 and 2010 but grouped under engineering/mechanical engineering alongside mining/construction technology/environmental technology.

https://www.deutsche-botanische-gesellschaft.de/en/about-us/promoting-young-scientists/wilhelm-pfeffer-prize accessed 26/04/2021.

https://www.deutsche-botanische-gesellschaft.de/ueber-die-dbg/nachwuchsfoerderung/wilhelm-pfeffer-preis/satzung-pfeffer-stiftung §4, accessed 26/04/2021.

These figures are lower than the official numbers for completed doctoral exams as published by the Federal Statistical Office in Series 11/4/2 because medicine is not included.

As this is a very low figure, we manually checked the results and did not notice any issues. We note that about 58,000 (about 17%) of the Google Books citation records did not have any names of authors.

This is not ideal because its classes are not aligned with the delimitations of university departments. The National Library data do not contain information about the university department which accepted a thesis. As this exercise is not intended to be understood as an evaluation of university departments but only as a feasibility study, we still use the classification in lack of a better alternative. It goes without saying that for any actual evaluation use this course of action is not appropriate. Instead, a verified list of the dissertations of each unit would be required and all publications related to the theses would have to be included.

This is not possible for EALL because early career researcher support was not assessed separately but compounded with acquisition of third party funding and ‘infrastructures and networks’ into a dimension called ‘enabling of research’ and the ratings in this category were further differentiated by four sub-fields (Wissenschaftsrat 2012 , p. 19).

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [Grant Numbers 01PQ16004 and 01PQ17001]. We thank Beatrice Schulz for help with data collection.

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Donner, P. Citation analysis of Ph.D. theses with data from Scopus and Google Books. Scientometrics 126 , 9431–9456 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04173-w

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Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah receives $100,000 prize

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NEW YORK (AP) — Fady Joudah, a Palestinian American poet who has said he writes for the future because “the present is demolished,” has received a $100,000 award from Poets & Writers.

Joudah is this year’s winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. He was chosen by a panel of three poets: Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo and Diane Seuss.

The judges’ citation, released Thursday, noted Joudah’s “significant and evolving body of work, distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”

Joudah’s books include “The Earth in the Attic” and “Tethered to the Stars,” along with English-language translations of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. His other honors include winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, in 2007, and receiving a PEN USA Literary Award.

The Jackson prize was established in 2007, and has previously been given to Sonia Sanchez, Joy Harjo and Claudia Rankine among others.

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Chemical Communications

Chemical control of crispr/cpf1 editing via orthogonal activation and deactivation of crosslinked crrna.

Through the integration of CRISPR/Cpf1 with optogenetics and a reduction-responsive motif, we have developed a photoactivatable cross-linked crRNA that enables precise genome editing upon light exposure. This system also allows for termination of editing activity through external application of reducing agents. The dual-stimuli-responsive CRISPR/Cpf1 editing process operates in a unique OFFONOFF sequence, making it a valuable tool for investigating time-sensitive biological events.

• This article is part of the themed collection: 2024 Pioneering Investigators

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C. Lin, W. Chen, L. Liu and L. Cheng, Chem. Commun. , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4CC01106F

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Gotta go? New bladder device lets you know

• Feinberg School of Medicine

Should you run to the bathroom now? Or can you hold it until you get home? A new implant and associated smartphone app may someday remove the guess work from the equation.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new soft, flexible, battery-free implant that attaches to the bladder wall to sense filling. Then, it wirelessly — and simultaneously — transmits data to a smartphone app, so users can monitor their bladder fullness in real time.

The study will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It marks the first example of a bioelectronic sensor that enables continuous monitoring of bladder function for a prolonged period.

While this new device is unnecessary for the average person, it could be a game-changer for people with paralysis, spina bifida, bladder cancer or end-stage bladder disease — where bladder function is often compromised, and bladder reconstruction surgery may be required. The sensor system also can enable clinicians to monitor their patients remotely and continuously to make more informed — and faster — treatment decisions.

“If bladder nerves are damaged from surgery or from a disease such as spina bifida, then a patient often loses sensation and is unaware that their bladder is full,” said Northwestern’s Guillermo A. Ameer , who co-led the work. “To empty the bladder, they often have to use catheters, which are uncomfortable and can lead to painful infections. We want to eliminate the use of catheters and bypass current bladder function monitoring procedures, which are highly invasive, very unpleasant and must be done in a hospital or clinical setting.”

This work brings us closer to the reality of smart regenerative systems...”

An expert in regenerative engineering, Ameer is the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and professor of surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine . He also directs the Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering and the predoctoral Regenerative Engineering Training Program, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Ameer co-led the study with Northwestern’s John A. Rogers and Arun Sharma . A bioelectronics pioneer, Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery at McCormick and Feinberg. He also directs the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics . Sharma is a research associate professor of urology at Feinberg and of biomedical engineering at McCormick. He also is director of pediatric urological regenerative medicine at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago .

How it works and initial results

Due to problems with nerves, brain or spinal cord, millions of Americans suffer from dysfunctional bladders. These issues can arise from congenital defects such as spina bifida — where a person is born with a damaged spine — or traumatic injuries sustained at any point in life. When left untreated, severe bladder dysfunction can cause routine infections and urination issues, eventually leading to kidney damage, which affects the entire body. Enabling physicians to remotely monitor their patients could enable faster interventions.

To monitor the bladder, the new device comprises multiple sensors, which work together to measure one simple parameter: strain. As the bladder fills, it expands. The fuller the bladder becomes, the more it stretches. This stretching pulls on the elastic-like device to signal strain. Likewise, when the bladder empties, it contracts, which then relieves strain. As the sensors detect various levels of strain, the device uses embedded Bluetooth technology to transmit this information to a smartphone or tablet.

“The key advance here is in the development of super soft, ultrathin, stretchable strain gauges that can gently wrap the outside surface of the bladder, without imposing any mechanical constraints on the natural filling and voiding behaviors,” Rogers said.

In small animal studies, the system successfully delivered real-time measurements of bladder filling and emptying for 30 days. Then, in a study using non-human primates, the system successfully delivered information for eight weeks. The researchers also demonstrated that the sensors are sensitive enough to detect strain from very low volumes of urine.

“This work is the first of its kind that is scaled for human use,” Ameer said. “We demonstrated the potential long-term function of the technology. Depending on the use case, we can design the technology to reside permanently inside the body or to harmlessly dissolve after the patient has made a full recovery.”

Bladder regeneration and function restoration

Although the new technology is useful on its own, Ameer envisions it as one component of a fully integrated system for bladder function restoration.

Just last month, Ameer and Sharma introduced a biodegradable synthetic, flexible “bladder patch,” which was published in PNAS Nexus. Seeded with the patient’s own stem cells, the citrate-based “patch” — referred to as a pro-regenerative scaffold (PRS) — enables the surgeon to reconstruct or rebuild the bladder without the need to harvest intestinal tissue, the current clinical standard for this surgery. The “patch,” which expands and contracts with the native bladder tissue, supports the migration and growth of bladder cells. Then it slowly dissolves, leaving behind new bladder tissue. The researchers demonstrated that the new tissue remained functional throughout the two-year study.

“We are working to integrate our bladder regeneration technology with this novel wireless bladder monitoring technology to restore bladder function and monitor the recovery process after surgery,” Ameer said. “This work brings us closer to the reality of smart regenerative systems, which are implantable pro-regenerative devices capable of probing their microenvironment, wirelessly reporting those findings outside the body (to the patient, caregiver or manufacturer) and enabling on-demand or programmed responses to change course and improve device performance or safety.”

“This technology represents a significant advancement, as there are currently no other tissue engineering-based approaches available to these patients,” Sharma said. “I am confident this will help improve the quality of life for many patients who will now be able to avoid the use of intestinal tissues and its myriad complications.”

Next: Urinating on demand

Ameer continues to work with Rogers and Sharma to build new functionalities into the system. They currently are exploring ways that the implant could stimulate the bladder to induce urination on demand.

“In addition to monitoring the filling, the app will be able to send warnings to the patient and then direct them to locations for the nearest restrooms,” Ameer said. “Also, one day, patients will be able to trigger urination, on demand, through their smartphone.”

Ameer, Sharma and Rogers are members of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology . Ameer and Rogers are members of the International Institute for Nanotechnology.  Ameer is a member of the  Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, and Rogers is a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University .

The study, “A wireless, implantable bioelectronic system for monitoring urinary bladder function following surgical recovery,” was supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

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